


Shine On You Crazy Diamond

by blarfkey



Series: Come Together [4]
Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Established epic bro-ship of Peter and Erik, Father-Son Relationship, Five year time skip!, Found Families, Gen, Growing Pains, M/M, Overprotective!Peter, Peter is slowly (VERY SLOWLY) maturing (maybe), Sibling Bonding, Teacher!Erik, The Terrifying Rivalry between Scott and Wanda!, The epic friendship of Jean and Wanda, Unofficial Adoption, exploding shit, school fic, teacher!Peter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-04-22 23:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4854872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blarfkey/pseuds/blarfkey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years later, Peter has gotten his college degree and settled into life as a P.E. teacher at Charles' school.  He's got his whole routine mapped out: combat training with Erik and Raven in the mornings, running the Baby Mutants ragged on the field until they start planning his assassination in the afternoons, mixed in with calling Hank every variation of "nerd" American slang can provide and staring at Raven's butt when she's too busy to kick him in the throat.</p><p>After all the crazy shit he's had to go through, he finds comfort in this new-found stability, even if it means he's officially a Boring Adult who shops for prunes and wheat bread.</p><p>And then Wanda blows up a car.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic will have to be posted in installments because it has just exploded. I'm 20K and change now and it's only two thirds completed. It's a monster. So here is part one!

“Scott Summers, get your ass into that pool or I swear to God!”

Scott glares at Peter from underneath the umbrella. At least, Peter thinks it’s a glare. Scott always looks like he’s glaring at something with that visor thing. Peter’s not the mind reader, but he bets that Scott doesn’t want Jean to see his skinny, pasty ass out of a shirt.

“You swear to God what, sir?”

“I told you not to call me ‘sir’. I’m not old enough for ‘sir.’ Jesus.”

“Well I’m not calling you that either.”

Was Peter ever this annoying at fourteen?  Sometimes he doesn’t know whether to smack his students upside the head or laugh at them.

 “Or I swear to God I will wake your ass up at three in the morning to come out here and do twice as many laps.”

Scott crosses his arms. “You can’t do that.”

“Dude, Professor X likes me more than you. Who’s gonna stop me?”

Jean swims up to the edge of the pool and rests her chin on the ledge. Her red hair fans out behind her like a mermaid. “Come on, Scott. The water’s not that cold and you’ll get used to it.”

Her powers tug him playfully by the shirt. Scott folds like a house of cards and takes his shirt off, muttering under his breath.

Peter blows on his whistle. “Now that everyone has stopped being babies, we can get started. Everyone line up by the steps. When I blow on the whistle again, I want you all to do five laps. First one finished gets a Mr. Goodbar!”

“Aren’t sweets counterproductive after gym class?” Scott demands.

Peter whips his head around. What fucking fourteen year old cares about that kind of shit? There had to be some kind of mix up at the hospital because there is no way that Scott and Alex are related.

“Excellent point, Summers. The kid who finishes first gets a Mr. Goodbar except for Scott, who gets an apple or a grapefruit or some shit. On your mark! Get set! GO!”

Peter blows as loud as possible on the whistle and his five students take off with the finesse and elegance of a whale having a seizure.

 

Five years ago, when Peter “graduated,” Charles finally got off his ass and cleared Peter’s name with the government. It required several trips to D.C. and lots of mind wiping.  Thankfully, Peter’s face was never widely advertised like Erik’s. He was a free man and could do pretty much whatever the fuck he wanted.

So what did he do?

He went to fucking _college._

Yeah yeah, Peter kind of shocked himself too. And not even college in a cool place, like California or something. He went local: Lehman College in New York City. Nothing fancy (Erik and Charles really pushed for Columbia) but the small campus suited Peter just fine, and the liberal arts programs meant his silver hair never stood out among the riot of other hair colors.

At first he did it for Charles. The man gave him an entirely new life, one of actual happiness, one that finally felt like he belonged in. And Charles had helped not only Peter, but countless other mutants once the school reopened.  Peter wanted to repay the favor, and he knew getting a degree would make Charles happy.

During his second semester, though, Peter found out that he actually _liked_ learning. At least, learning cool shit that he picked out for himself and not shit other people forced on him. He got a Physical Education degree, because that was fun, but he also took a lot of history classes.

He couldn’t stop after his two American and World history requirements. Yeah, it’s all about a bunch of dead people, but what happened with those dead people still affects everyone today. Germany getting fucked over in World War One caused Hitler to get elected, which caused Erik’s entire family to die, which caused Erik to lose his shit in Cuba, which caused him to work alone to save Kennedy, which caused him to go to prison, which caused his and Peter’s new relationship, which caused Peter to go to college, which caused him to be here, driving the baby Mutants crazy in the swimming pool.

 It makes Peter sound like a yuppie high off his ass, but everything is connected, man. Everything. And he loves it, loves to research through all those connecting dots, like working backwards out of a maze.

Charles says that if Peter can handle teaching Phys Ed without killing anyone, then maybe he can teach history next year.

 

Summers swims his ass off, finishing first so that he can return to scowling under the umbrella with his shirt on. Charles says that having an older brother as tough and badass as Alex has given the kid some kind of complex.

Peter lets the kids beach themselves on the side of the pool on their towels and soak in the sun. Warren lies on his stomach and flaps his wings up, smacking Pitor in the face. Peter whips out his sunglasses and gets ready to chill on his own towel when Raven shows up.

“Your mom’s here,” she says. “Friday’s a little early for a weekend visit.”

Peter shrugs. Maybe Wanda had a day off of school. “Can you watch the runts?”

“Yeah, sure. We can continue practicing our chokeholds.”

A collective groan rises from the kids. Peter grins.

“Have fun, runts!” he says before dashing off to the driveway.

 

The instant Mom steps out of the car Peter knows something is wrong because she is not wearing any makeup. Mom never leaves the house without her “face” on, not even to get gas or grocery shop. And she sure as fuck would never show up without makeup in front of Charles and Erik.

“Where’s Charles?” Mom demands. “I need to see him.”

Erik takes a step forward and then stops. Even after five years of sporadic weekend visits, he still treats Mom like a deer that might spook at the mere sight of him.

“Charles is teaching a class.”

 “What’s wrong?” Peter asks. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Wanda.”

Fear clenches Peter’s chest with cold fingers. He gazes into the car at Wanda curled up in the back, slouched so far down in her seat that only the puff of her wild hair is visible. Usually she can’t wait to see Peter so much that she jumps out of the car before it comes to a complete stop. Now she has her face buried in her knees and she doesn’t move, even when Peter taps on the window.

“What happened to her? Did someone hurt her? Because I will—” _kill them._ Peter swallows these last two words before they can unsettle Mom.

“She’s not hurt. She’s . . .” Mom sighs and wraps her arms around herself. “She’s like you.”

 _She’s like you_.

His chest cracks open in pure, unbridled joy. Oh my God. _Oh my fucking God_ , Wanda is a mutant! Wanda has bitching powers! Peter could launch himself into the sky like a rocket, and the severity of his mother’s face is the only thing keeping him level.

“She manifested?” Erik asks.

Mom nods. “She’s twelve, around the same age that Peter did. I just . . . didn’t expect it from her. I thought he got it from you.”

“What did she do? What power does she have?” Peter asks.

“I don’t know.” She steps further away from the car and drops her voice. “She blew up Carl’s new corvette.”

Peter’s eyebrows jump. “That’s fucking awesome!”

“No, it’s not!” Mom hisses. She raises a hand as if to slap him and Peter still flinches even though he’s twenty-two years old and a whole head taller than her. “Wanda had a massive panic attack. She’s almost too afraid to breathe at this point. And Carl . . . Carl didn’t handle it well. He called her . . .” She bit her lip. “He called her a monster,” she finished in a whisper.

Jesus Christ. No wonder Wanda looks so dejected. He and Erik exchange looks, both coming to the same conclusion: Carl is a dead man walking.

“Can she stay here?” Mom asks. “I refuse to let her get anywhere near that bastard, and Charles can help her.”

“Absolutely,” says Erik. “Peter, talk to Hank and get her a room. I’ll get Charles.”

Peter salutes him. “Roger that, Dad.”

He speeds off to the lab.

 

Even though the school’s been open for roughly four years, they still have lots of empty dorm rooms. But Peter doesn’t know if Mom will formally enroll Wanda or if this is just a temporary thing, so Peter and Hank haul one of the bunk beds from a random dorm room and install it in Peter’s room on the third floor where the staff sleeps. He doesn’t want to leave Wanda alone, not for the first night at least.

Back outside, Mom tries to coax Wanda out of the backseat while Erik stands around uselessly, looking stern and intimidating, which is his default mode.

“Charles is meeting us in the kitchen,” Erik murmurs to Peter.

“Wanda, honey, are you hungry?” Mom asks.

Wanda’s fluffy head just barely shakes.

“Wanda, you need to get out of the car. You’re safe here. You know that. Everyone here is just like you.”

Peter kneels down beside his mom.

“Hey, Squirt,” he says. “I got you bunked in my room, just like old times.”

At the sound of Peter’s voice, Wanda finally lifts her head. Her dark eyes are bloodshot, her face ashen. Peter tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear.

“I got, like, three tubs of ice cream in the freezer. You want a piggyback ride?”

“ . . . I’m too big for a piggyback ride,” she finally whispers.

Success! Booya!

“You’re never too big for a piggyback ride. Come on.” He unbuckles her seatbelt and turns his back to her. For a moment nothing happens. “Hurry up, Squirt. That ice cream isn’t going to eat itself.”

Finally he felt her thin arms wrap themselves hesitantly around his neck. He reaches around and grabs her jean-clad legs and then dashes off to the kitchen. A veteran with years of experience, Wanda doesn’t puke when Peter deposits her by the island. She just steadies herself with a hand on the counter.

“We got chocolate chip cookie dough, mint chocolate, and strawberry. Pick your poison.”

“Cookie dough, please,” murmurs Wanda. Her eyes dart around the room, taking in the old wood and granite counters. No one eats here anymore unless someone sneaks out of their dorm for a midnight snack, but the small table still sits by the window for Charles and Erik to have coffee on early in the morning.

Peter zips through the kitchen, grabbing the spoon and bowl so fast it must look like a ghost moving around. He loves impressing Wanda with his powers, who has always watched him with amazement.

In five seconds he presents her with heaping bowl of ice cream and a fresh spoon. Wanda eats it in slow, tiny bites, almost like she’s afraid of it. She doesn’t speak either, which isn’t totally unusual. The cowed, fearful gleam in her eyes, though. That is very unusual and Peter doesn’t like it.

Mom, Erik, and Charles join them a couple of minutes later. Erik carries Wanda’s pastel pink backpack, and he deposits it on the counter beside her. Mom hops onto a stool beside Wanda, and Charles glides to a stop in front of her. He gives her a warm smile.

“It’s always good to see you, Wanda, even though I wish today’s circumstances were better,” he says. “You look more and more grown up every time I see you.”

“Thank you,” Wanda murmurs, still remembering her manners. Of course, it’s also almost impossible to be rude to Charles and his sweet, puppy dog face.

“Your mother tells me you’ve manifested your power,” Charles continues. He gives her another smile. “That’s wonderful news! I’m sure, though, that it must have come as some kind of shock to you. Often times we manifest during puberty, at times of great emotional stress. It’s perfectly natural and nothing to feel ashamed of.”

If Peter didn’t know better, he would say Charles sounded like an awkward sex ed teacher talking about masturbation. He swallows a giggle.

“However, some powers can be dangerous if they are not harnessed and controlled. If you tell me exactly what happened today, I can help you figure out what exactly your power is and teach you to control it.”

Wanda stares at them, her eyes roving from face to face and she shrinks even further into herself.

“I – I don’t – I . . .”

Charles studies her for a moment, fingers on his temple, and Peter knows the guy is ghosting through her mind. He leans back in his wheelchair.

“She only wants to talk with you,” he says. “How about you take her and her ice cream up to my study? No one should bother you there.”

“I’ll make sure of it,” adds Erik.

“Is that better for you, Wanda?” Charles asks her kindly.

Wanda nods.

Peter puts on a brave face but inside he’s freaking out. This needs emotional maturity and delicacy that Peter does _not_ have.

 _Charles, I’m going to fuck this up,_ he projects, trying to keep his poker face.

_Nonsense. You are her favorite, most trusted person in the world. You will do fine._

_Yeah, thanks. No fucking pressure or anything._

 

Charles’ study is tucked away in the west corner of the third floor, as far away from the school section of the mansion as one can get without going into the attic, which is banned from everyone. He has an office on the first floor where students can go for tutoring or calling their parents, or to have a total meltdown. But the study is Charles’ sanctuary, and no one but Erik sets foot inside. Charles probably suggested it so Wanda can freak out properly away from the other kids.

The study is tiny, crammed with a small desk, two squat shelves of books, and a squashy love seat. Unlike the rest of the mansion, nothing matches. The desk is scratched up walnut, the dark green carpet clashes with the pale yellow loveseat with faded purple roses. One bookshelf is slightly taller and wider than the other and stained considerably darker.

(He spots a very old-looking copy of _The Origin of Species_ and has to clamp down on a hysterical giggle. What is Charles gonna do if Peter fucks up and Wanda loses her shit again and blows up a bookshelf full of priceless first editions?)

The second Peter shuts the door behind him, Wanda’s face crumples like a soggy soufflé and she buries her face in his chest.

Fuck! Shit!

 Alarms scream in his head and he knows he’s supposed to react to this, but he doesn’t know what to do except wrap his arms around her tiny frame, one hand petting her bushy hair. He’s held her plenty of times when she’s cried, over fights with Laura or getting her first F on a spelling test. Never for something this serious. The go-to solutions of sweets and fancy power tricks won’t fix this.

“It’s okay, Wanda,” he says, even though she’ll never believe him, even though it’s a lie, because he has nothing else. “Everything is fine. Just tell me what happened and we will get this all sorted out.”

“I can’t,” she sobs. “You’ll hate me.”

Oh, Jesus Christ.

“That’s not true! That will never be true. You could murder someone and I will still love you, and I can back that up with past experience. I’m certainly not going to be pissed that you blew up Carl’s car. I should throw you a party.”

There is a strange hiccup that could be a stifled giggle. Peter takes this as encouragement and slowly walks them over to the loveseat.

“Start from the beginning,” he says.

Wanda wipes her face with her sleeve and takes a deep breath.

“I was riding my bike with Laura. We were having a race, and Daddy was washing the car. He had just gotten it last week. He’s, like, obsessed with it.” She rolls her eyes a bit, giving Peter a flash of the normal Wanda. “Well, I swerved too close to the car and almost hit it and wrecked into the bush. Daddy started yelling at me because I could have scratched his car or something and–”

She hiccups, her voice becoming thick with fresh tears. “I scraped my knee and it was bleeding and it hurt and all he seemed to care about was that stupid car and I didn’t even hit it but he was yelling at me like I did and I just got so mad. I thought I would hurt his car for real so at least he would have something to yell about and . . .”

Wanda stares at her hands like they aren’t a part of her body, like they’re alien. Peter waits for her to continue, but she stays silent.

“And . . .” he prompts her.

Wanda swallows and says in a whisper, “I felt something in me, something weird, something . . . powerful. I can’t explain it. But I stared at the car, and all of a sudden it just caught on fire. Like, out of nowhere! Laura was screaming and running away, Daddy was screaming. I backed up into the bush, and Mommy came out. Daddy looked at me like . . . like I was the worst thing in the universe. He pointed his finger at me and told Mommy that – that I was a monster and a w-w-itch – ”

Wanda dissolves into tears once more, and all Peter can do is hold her against his side and tell her that she is perfect even though he knows she won’t believe him.

He hates Carl more than he has ever hated another human being.

 

 

 

After Wanda sobs herself out, Peter takes her to meet with their parents in Charles’ office. On the way down he tells her about some of the stupid fights he gets into with Baby Summers to make her laugh. She gifts him with a hesitant smile, which he receives like it’s tickets to a Creedence concert.

Their parents wait in the office. Charles sits at his desk, Erik and Mom on the other side, and all three of them drinking coffee. Peter tamps down on a giggle at the sight, which looks like an intense parent-teacher meeting.

After five years of intermittent visits, Erik and Mom have developed a weirdly chill relationship.  Erik changes into something unrecognizable whenever she shows up. Suddenly, everything about Erik’s tone, his body language, his choice of words, serves to make him appear non-threatening.  He bends over backwards to accommodate her, and generally bows and kneels to her like a lovesick butler.

Which is hilarious because usually Erik _loves_ intimidating the shit out of people.  But Peter knows that a part of Erik still loves Mom and he hates himself over their “break up” even more than twenty years later. He never wants to give Mom a reason to fear him again.

Ironically, Erik’s shift in behavior kind of freaked Mom out at first. Erik has such a track record for being a violent loose cannon that his kindness feels like a trap. Peter felt the same way when Erik apologized and cooked him eggs that night after his own prison break. But eventually she warmed up to him and now they have tea and coffee with Charles on the terrace when she visits.

If Charles feels any jealousy at all, he doesn’t show it.

Right now he and Erik are pointing out things in the Xavier Academy brochure. Peter’s stomach twists at the sight. On one hand, it would be super awesome to have Wanda around all the time. But if she’s going to stay here, it means Mom will be alone. It means things back home are so bad that there is no fixing it.

Charles looks up and smiles. “Hello, Wanda. Erik, if you please?”

Her lips twitch into an almost smile because Charles has that effect on pretty much everyone, even Satan, probably.

Erik lifts his hand and two chairs levitate into the room from the hallway. Peter plops himself down. Mom holds open her arm and Wanda walks into the embrace, settling her head on Mom’s shoulder.

 “Wanda, you’re going to stay with Peter for a while,” Mom began. She rubbed Wanda’s back with a slender hand. “I have some things back home I want to take care of, and I need to do it myself.”

“It’s just a few days, right?” Wanda asks. “Not forever?”

“That all depends on you,” says Charles. “Your mother and I have spoken. During your stay here, you are free to try out the school. You can interact with the other students, sit in on classes. If you like it here, you are more than welcome to transfer here for as long as you want. If you don’t feel comfortable here, you are more than welcome to return home on the stipulation that you return here every few weekends, so that I can help you train your powers.”

Wanda flips through the brochure, looking like she swallowed a jar of pickle juice.

“Just try it out,” Mom says. “It’s okay if you don’t like it.”

“Okay,” says Wanda.

Charles tries to talk up the school after that, describing the different classes he teaches, the field trips they take, the kind of powers the other students have. Peter pitches in, too, with some of his better experiences (that are kid friendly). Wanda listens, but Peter can tell she’s made her mind up not to like this place and he wonders what the hell her problem is. Charles’ school is a mutant’s paradise and way better than her shitty middle school. (So Charles turned him into an education snob. So what?)

Afterwards, Mom takes Wanda back to the car to get her stuff, and Peter shares Wanda’s conversation with Charles and Erik.

“Spontaneous combustion? That’s amazing,” Erik says. He sounds like the proud papa that Carl was supposed to be.

“And terrifying if you have no idea what’s going on,” Charles adds. “Her fear practically choked the room. If she has no idea what caused it, then she has no idea how to prevent it from happening again.”

“We can help her though, right?” says Peter.

Charles gives him a reassuring smile. “Of course, Peter. We help all mutants, but we certainly won’t leave you sister high and dry. Get her settled in tonight and try to calm her nerves, and we will figure out a plan in the morning.”

 

 

Erik convinces Magda to stay for lunch. The kids are used to seeing her and Wanda around, so they don’t question it. Jean smiles at Wanda and passes her the hot dog buns with her mind. Charles used to enforce the “no powers are the dinner table” rule, but Erik never followed it, usually to scare any new kids into submission by levitating his knifes to cut his food. All the rest of them followed suit, much to Charles’ continuing aggravation, until he just gave up.

Wanda hugs Mom goodbye like they are never going to see each other again. Mom strokes her hair and whispers reassurances to her while Peter feels a bit jealous. After all, Wanda has more fun with him than Mom. What is he now, boiled cabbage?

Finally Wanda unglues herself and walks back to the house so stoic and resolutely that Peter knows she is fighting off tears. He _hates_ seeing her cry, has always hated it, even when she was a baby and that was her job.

He could murder Carl, he really could.

He hugs Mom goodbye but she doesn’t let go of his shoulder when he pulls away. She gives him a stern look.

“Peter, I know you hate Carl and it’s tempting to tell Wanda how awful he is. Don’t do it, okay? Don’t say anything bad about him in front of her.”

 “Why not? He’s a bastard!”

Does telepathy rub off or something?

Mom closes her eyes for a moment. “I know that, Peter. Trust me, I know. But he’s still her father and she still loves him. Telling her what a bastard he is won’t make her feel any better about this. That’s a conclusion she will have to come to her own in time, if she ever does.”

“What do you mean _if?_ You think she would still care about that son of a bitch after what he did to her?

“Peter, did I ever shit-talk _your_ father? Or did I let you come to your own conclusion?”

Peter opens his mouth but nothing comes out. Goddamn it, why does Mom _always_ win? She’s worse than Charles.

“What about you?” he asks instead.

Carl has always been the main bone of contention between them. He’ll never get why she sticks with him, puts up with him, even though Carl never deserved it. Carl’s not cruel to Mom, but he’s distant and ungrateful and he accepted Peter only grudgingly and never liked him. What kind of parent stays with a guy who hates her kid? What kind of parent stays with a guy who hates _both_ her kids?

Mom sighs. “I came to the conclusion that Carl was a bastard a long time ago. Trust me, I’m not going back there to patch things up. I’m going there to end it and get our shit.”

Peter actually does jump and holler at that, throwing his fist into the air. He ignores Mom’s glare because god _damn_ it’s about time.

“So are you coming back here? Are you going to live with us?”

It might be a little strange and awkward at first, but the more Peter pictures life with all his family in one place, the more he wants it. He’s never had that before.

“Peter,” Mom sighs. She bites her lip. “I don’t know. This isn’t going to happen overnight. I have to contact lawyers, divide all our belongings, maybe sell the house. That takes time.  I also have my job to keep up. I’m a nurse, Peter, I can’t just quit. I have responsibilities.”

It feels like a balloon just popped in his chest. “I understand,” he says, fighting to keep the disappointment out of his voice like a mature adult.

Mom pulls him into her arms. “I’ll visit as often as I can. But I’m depending on you to take good care of your sister. She needs you right now.”

“Of course I will.” As if she needed to ask! “She’ll have a great time here.”

“I’m hoping. I don’t think there is any place better for her, but I won’t force her to stay.”

 _Maybe you should_ Peter thinks. His teenage self would kick his own ass for thinking that, but if Wanda doesn’t get her moody, pre-teen head out of her ass, where the fuck else can she go and be safe? Erik might go overboard with the human hate and paranoia but he’s not wrong about how dangerous they can be to mutants. Now Wanda has a giant target on her back, for the rest of her life. Peter would do anything to keep her from getting hurt, even if she hated him for it for a while.

 

That night he wakes up to the noise of muffled sobbing, a sound that shoots right through his chest like one of Summers’ plasma beams. He lies there, paralyzed and mentally freaking out because comforting seven-year-old Wanda about boogeymen was a cake walk and comforting moody pre-teen Wanda about her crazy, violent powers is a fucking minefield.

There are so many ways to fuck up and make everything worse and why is this all on Peter to make her feel better? He doesn’t know the first goddamn thing about little girls! He hasn’t lived with Wanda in five years!

But his heart can only handle listening to her for roughly sixty seconds before it kicks his ass in gear. He pads softly across the room and sits down on the edge of her cot.

“Wanda?” he whispers. His hand hovers over her shoulder, unsure if she would welcome the touch or not.

Wanda goes still for a moment, and then her fuzzy head pops up from under the pillow, hand wiping away tears.

“I’m sorry I woke you up,” she says, her voice cracking. “I was trying to be quiet.”

Peter swallows thickly.

“I was already awake,” he lies. “I don’t sleep very much. You know that. Remember when I used to wake you up playing ping pong in the basement?”

“Do you have ping pong here?”

“I don’t . . . think so? What the fuck? How do we not have one?” Peter can’t believe he forgot about that during the school preparations. “I’ll get Charles to buy one, like, immediately. In the meantime we do have a library. You know, if you wanted to check that out.”

“You know where the library is?” Wanda asks in a flat voice. She loves to rub it in that she is way smarter than Peter was at her age and probably Peter now.

“Hardy har. Of course I know where the library is, as many times as Charles forced me in there for lessons.”

“ . . . does he have a lot of books?”

 Wanda loves reading, the little weirdo.

“A fuck ton.”

“I guess . . . I guess I could look at it,” she says. “I don’t think I’m going back to sleep any time soon.”

Peter sneaks them downstairs to the first floor. He never took Wanda to the library during her visits because, hello, that would be super boring. He’s excited to show it to her now. Her jaw nearly drops when she steps in, head swiveling around to drink in the towering bookshelves, complete with rolly ladders, the plush couches and arm chairs, the dark wood tables that glow under the warm lamp light.

She hovers just inside the doorway, drinking it all in, until Peter gives her a little push. Then she dashes straight toward the bookshelves, running her hands along the edge like she’s touching gold. Peter grabs _Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs_ and flops on one of the couches, while Wanda runs herself ragged on the rolly ladders.

Eventually she collapses in the armchair across from him, _Alice in Wonderland_ clutched in her hands. Despite _Alice_ being an old favorite of hers, she still casts speculative looks at Peter’s own book, as if she wants to swap.

“I didn’t know you could read,” she says.

“Screw you, Wanda, I have a college degree.” He almost says “fuck you” but figures she might not be old enough for that.

Wanda wrinkles her nose. “A P.E. teacher degree. You don’t need to read to get that.” She shoots a crooked smile and her eyes have that special glint she gets when she comes out of her shell enough to tease.

“ _Excuse you_ ,” says Peter, but there’s no heat in it. “I had to learn all kinds of biology and nutrition shit for that, thank you very much. You’re _twelve_. When you have five doctorates like Charles, then you can look down your nose at my degree.”

“I still can’t believe you got into college.”

“Me neither, Squirt. Me neither.”

They read in companionable silence, broken only by the passages Wanda thinks are especially weird or facts that Peter thinks are particularly gruesome.

“Do you think Alice could have been a mutant?”

“Alice isn’t real.”

“She was based off a real girl,” says Wanda, leaning forward in her seat. “All that growing and shrinking, that could be a mutant power.”

Huh. He’d never thought of it like that before. “How sweet would that be? You could, like, rob so many banks.”

Wanda rolls her eyes. “You know, being a kleptomaniac is probably a mental illness. You should get that looked at.”

“You should get this looked at,” says Peter, deciding that she isn’t too young for him to flip her off.

To his surprise, she returns it, even though she tarnishes that badass factor by instinctively looking around for witnesses first.

Peter high fives her.

 

Eventually Wanda falls asleep, head lolling against the high backed arm chair. Peter doesn’t disturb her and lets her sleep through breakfast, warning the other students away.

He has to get up at the ass crack of dawn anyway to help out with breakfast and then train with Erik, Raven, and Alex while Hank and Charles take over the morning classes. Ever since Peter got kidnapped all those years ago, Erik has been fucking obsessed with training him in hand to hand combat. He even kept it up through all of Peter’s college years, sneaking them into the gym at two in the morning on days Peter had late classes.

Fighting’s not really Peter’s style. He’s more of a duct-tape-you-to-the-wall-and-run-off sort, and no amount of fight skills could have protected him from the massive amounts of drugs his kidnappers injected into his system. But Erik won’t listen to any of that shit, and Peter sucks it up and learns for a lot of reasons.

One, he doesn’t need Charles’ fancy psychology degree to understand Erik’s fear of losing the people close to him. You know, again. One can trace back ninety percent of Erik’s violent, crazy decisions to that fear, so Peter is heavily invested in anything that will calm Erik down and keep his crazy shit to a minimum.

Two, Peter secretly likes it more than he probably should. He can’t help it. He feels like fucking James Bond, especially when he’s able to land a hit on Raven. They all force him to fight in slo-mo so they actually have a chance, but even Raven says that when Peter combines his powers with his training he would be fucking unstoppable.

Sometimes that idea scares him, when he has nightmares about losing control and just fucking everyone up – all the kids, all his classmates, Charles, people he loves, people he’s not even mad at – but mostly it thrills him. Plus, it’s fun, even when Peter and Erik show up to lunch with bloody noses and split knuckles

Three, it gives him an excuse to get in very close proximity to Raven. Peter’s not, like, _seriously_ into her, especially since she and Hank are sickeningly adorable and Peter’s never been interested in romance-y shit.

But ever since that bright afternoon when she first showed up, Raven immediately shot up to the top of Peter’s Sexiest People Alive list he keeps in his head and no one, not even Faye Dunaway, can unseat her. So even though Peter never had a fucking snowball’s chance in hell, and that’s fine, he would only pass up the chance of Raven pinning him to the ground if he were already dead.

 

Wanda reappears at lunch and then watches Peter’s gym classes from the terrace with a book in her lap. Charles joins her after a while and Peter spots them deep in discussion out the corner of his eye as his kids run laps.

So far, besides Peter, Wanda only talks to Charles. She barely says two words to the other students and avoids them whenever possible. This doesn’t go unnoticed, judging from the sad looks Jean throws Wanda every time his sister gives the girl one-syllable answers to small talk and can’t meet her eyes. Even Erik picks up on it.

“I’m afraid Wanda might be more her father’s daughter than you realize,” he murmurs that evening over their checkers game.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Look at her. She hates her own kind.”

Peter’s eyes flick over to his sister and the book she stubbornly hides behind while the other kids pile on the couch and watch T.V.

“She’s painfully shy and quiet,” says Peter. “And now, like, traumatized or whatever. Give her a break.”

Erik doesn’t look convinced, but wisely doesn’t say so. Still, it pisses Peter off. Of course, he can’t expect everyone to be a mind reader and understand Wanda’s naturally reserved personality the way he and Charles do. But she needs support now more than ever, and he wants to shake Erik for misunderstanding her and shake Wanda for practically encouraging this misunderstanding by being an aloof bitch (see, he did learn awesome vocabulary in college. Suck a dick, Charles).

He’ll give her one more day to pout before he says something.

 

That morning he forgoes his training routine to spy on Wanda during morning classes. She sits in the back and doodles hearts and flowers and clouds in her notebook and doesn’t volunteer to answer any questions, even though Charles is teaching a unit on English Romantic Poetry and Wanda loves that shit. She meets Jeans’ overtures of friendship with curt nods or ducking her head and ignoring the poor girl.

It’s weird and completely disrespectful and not like her at all.

After dinner he corners her in the library, where Wanda is hiding from everyone else.

“Watcha doing, Squirt?”

“I finished my other book,” she says, running her fingers over the leather spines of the poetry section.

“Jean was wondering if you would like to play cards or something with her.”

“No, thank you.”

Peter’s eyebrows rise up. “Seriously? You know, she’s easily the nicest person in, like, the entire school. Even nicer thank Hank. Even nicer than _Charles._ And she’s just your age.”

Wanda just shrugs and steadily avoids looking at him. Fuck this diplomacy shit. Peter doesn’t have the patience for Charles’ subtle guilt trips.

“Wanda? No offense, but, like, what the fuck? What is your deal?”

Wanda’s eyes dart over to him and she licks her lips. “What are you talking about?”

Peter glares at her. “Don’t bullshit me, Wanda. I am the King Bullshitter. You could be happy here but you’re not even trying. Instead you ignore everyone who is nice to you. Don’t you see how rude that is?”

His sister flushes. “I’m not trying to be rude. I just . . .” she trails off.

“You just what?”

“Ugh, Peter, can you just drop it?”

“No!” He crosses his arms. “You’re acting like a bitch. I want to know why.”

Wanda flinches at the word but he doesn’t feel bad.

“There’s no point in – in making friends or having fun here. This is all temporary, Peter. When Mom gets back I’m going back home, back to my _life_. I’m not sticking around.”

“Is it really that bad here?”

“No,” Wanda murmurs, her lip trembling. “I just – I miss my friends. I miss Laura. I liked my old life. I don’t want it to be gone.”

Her voice cracks and Peter hates himself.

“Wanda,” He sighs. “It is gone. It’s never going to be the same.”

She looks as if he slapped her. “Don’t say that! Don’t you dare!”

“It is true! Jesus, would you get your head out of your ass and _look_? You really think you’re just here to check out the school? Mom and Carl are getting a divorce!”

Her hand flies up to cover her mouth and Peter wants to rip his voice box out. He was _not_ supposed to tell her that.

“No! That’s not true! Why would you say that!?”

“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “Mom wanted to wait until you got settled in here to tell you –”

Wanda covers her ears. “Shut up! Stop lying to me!”

“I’m not lying! Wanda, please –“

“Just shut up, Peter! I hate you!”

He reaches out for her and she flings her arms out to block him. Something strange and . . . purple-y shoots out and Peter trips and smacks his head on the wooden floor. He watches an upside down Wanda run out of the room.

 

Of course he could catch up to her in a nanosecond, but he lets her go, mainly because it feels like someone just stabbed him. This must have been how Erik felt when Peter tried to punch him in the face. He didn’t mean those words then and Wanda doesn’t mean them now, but it hurts all the same.

Head throbbing, he gingerly picks himself up to find that not only did he miss landing on the plush oriental rug by, like, an _inch_ , but that apparently he tripped over his own shoelace, even though he triple knots them.

He alerts Charles about Wanda and then finds himself wandering to Erik’s study and knocking on the door.

“I think I just fucked up,” he says when Erik opens the door.

Erik wordlessly steps aside and allows Peter entry. H throws himself into Erik’s desk chair and starts fiddling with the Newton’s cradle that Erik keeps on his desk probably for the sole purpose of Peter’s fidgeting. His dad leans against the desk, arms crossed.

“Well,” he prompts. “You screw up so often you’ll have to be more specific.”

“Hardy har,” says Peter. He swallows. “I told Wanda that her parents are getting a divorce, and she told me she hated me before she ran out the room.”

Erik closes his eyes. “Why the hell would you do that?”

“Because she said that life at the school is temporary and she’s just waiting to go back to her old life. Her old life is gone! I don’t know why that has to be a fucking secret from her! What happens when she goes back and nothing is the same?”

“She will realize for herself that she must move on and then she will do so,” says Erik with the kind of serene confidence that Peter wishes he had right now.

“How do you fucking know that? She doesn’t handle surprises that well, _clearly_.”

“She’ll have no other choice.” Erik cocks his head to the side. “Are you alright, Peter?”

“Yeah. Great.” Peter tips his head back and stares at the ceiling. “I mean, I don’t know. I know she didn’t mean it and I’m just as guilty of saying horrible shit to people I care about but . . . it sucked? I’m trying to help her, you know? No one else is being honest with her.”

Erik graces him with a soft smile. “Welcome to adulthood. Don’t worry so much, Peter. You are good for her.”

 “That’s debatable, but thanks, Dad.” He looks over at Erik. “When did you get so calm and wise and shit?”

“I’ve always been wise, no one just wants to acknowledge it,” retorts Erik. “As for calm . . . well a lot can change in five years.” He nods at Peter. “Especially when you have the proper incentive.”

“Jesus, you’re getting cheesy in your old age,” says Peter, but he smiles.

 

While Peter talked with Erik, Charles allowed Wanda to call Mom. So that cat’s officially out of the bag. Mom would probably have yelled at Peter, but he made himself scarce when Charles mentally called for him. Wanda doesn’t return to the room and Peter doesn’t go looking for her.

Erik and Wanda’s words follow Peter that night and keep him from sleep (what else is new?). He realizes, as he takes his usual run around the grounds, that Wanda was ripped out of her life and dropped here so suddenly, no wonder she feels confused and disoriented. She needs some kind of closure. Maybe then, like Erik said, she’ll have no other choice but to move on.

Slowly, an idea forms in his head. A crazy idea that could blow up in his face in a hundred ways, but Peter plans it out anyway. Like risk ever stopped him from doing anything.

 

He’s not a complete idiot, so he gives Charles a heads up first before breakfast.

“I’m taking Wanda on a road trip today,” he announces as Charles fixes the coffee, still in his robe.

To his credit, Charles merely raises a fine eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“I think she needs closure. I can let her say goodbye to her friend, at least. Maybe then she’ll feel better about living here.”

“Very astute of you,” says Charles, smiling. Smug bastard probably knew what Peter was planning since last night when Peter fucking planned it. “I also think it would do her good. But –” Charles holds up a finger, “she cannot, under any circumstances, interact with Carl. She’s not ready for it, and I imagine it would end very badly.”

“Don’t worry. That bastard won’t see so much as the back of her head.”

 

Wanda spent the night in one of the spare dorm rooms, too ashamed to face Peter (according to Charles). He wakes her up with a warm cup of spiced tea. She takes it with a shy smile, her eyes not meeting his.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he says

“Me too,” she whispers.

Peter drags the desk chair over and straddles it while Wanda sips her tea and rubs the sleep from her eyes.

“Mom says she didn’t want you to tell me,” she says after long moments of silence.

“Yeah . . . she’s probably really pissed at me.”

Wanda nods. “I’m glad you did. You’re the only one who doesn’t treat me like a baby.”

“I could have picked a better way to tell you, though.”

She shrugs, graciously refraining from confirming this.

“So I thought you and me could skip class today and go on a road trip.”

To her credit, Wanda looks completely unfazed at this random and sudden change in plans. She has long since grown used to Peter’s spontaneous urges (which is something Mom hoped he might grow out of, but nope! It’s a fundamental part of his personality now).

“Where to?” is all she asks.

Peter waggles his eyebrows. “It’s a surprise.”

Wanda takes another sip of tea. “Okay. Can I eat and shower first?”

This is why he loves his sister best out of everyone in the world. Though Erik is a very close second.

 

No road trip is complete without snacks, so Hank helps him scour the pantry for portable goods. Immediately Peter reaches for the Twinkies and the chips. Hank pops popcorn on the stove and shovels it in a paper bag and then helps Peter make up a few turkey sandwiches.

“Wanda is a sweet girl,” he tells Peter. “I hope she finds some peace in this. I hate seeing her so sad.”

Because he’s the best dad in the entire universe and because Peter has matured a tiny bit since he was seventeen and because the irony is too goddamn beautiful to pass up, Erik allows Peter to take the Corvette. Wanda dutifully puts her seatbelt on the second she sits down and Erik holds the car captive, spinning in the driveway, until he sees Peter do the same.

“Jesus, old man, have some faith,” he complains but Erik just gives him that patented stare until the man feels more than sees Peter click his seatbelt into place.

He fiddles with the radio, taking it off the classical station and finding the rock station and then they’re off.

Usually Peter can keep a steady stream of conversation going all by himself, but he allows the two of them to enjoy the music and the brightening morning without chatter. Wanda and Erik are the only people he ever felt comfortable with to enjoy silence. Occasionally he and Wanda will stick his head out the window and scream “MOOOOOO” at the occasional cows. Sometimes they sing along to their favorite songs.

They pull over at the occasional rest stop so Peter can stretch his legs and run a few hundred laps around the property if no one else is around. Six hours is a long-as fucking time to stay still. Even so, Wanda never asks where they are going and her implicit trust warms the cockles of his cynical heart.

Only when reach the familiar streets of their old subdivision does Wanda look at him with nervous eyes.

“Peter, where are we going?” she asks slowly.

“Well, I know you’re upset that you didn’t really get to say goodbye, and it’s a Saturday so, you know, Laura will probably be home.”

Immediately her eyes light up only for that light to dim a second later. “She saw what happened,” she says, biting her lip. “What if she doesn’t want to see me?”

That is a complication that Peter purposefully did not dwell upon when planning this out. If Laura rejects Wanda like Carl did, it will probably feel like someone taking a fractured bone and crushing it under their boot. But, as Erik pointed out that morning, that rejection might drive Wanda to cut off all her old ties completely and fully embrace her new life at the school. He says this almost gleefully, like he wants Wanda’s human friend to fulfill Erik’s still extremely prejudiced view of humans. Admittedly, that’s the goal Peter wants to accomplish, but not under those circumstances.

So he lies, which has always served him well in the past.

“She’s your best friend, man. Best friends stick together through anything.”

“Have your best friends stuck with you?”  Wanda asks, her eyebrows raised skeptically because they both know that during high school Peter never had a best friend.

But he thinks about his new life in Westchester. “Well, you know, Erik’s stuck with me through a lot. And Hank and Raven.”

 “You call your dad your best friend? Are you an episode of Sesame Street?”

“Shut up, Wanda.”

The closer they edge to Laura’s house, two streets away from their old house, the more Wanda chews on her fingernails. Finally, Peter slides up and parks beside the mail box and looks at her expectantly. She doesn’t move.

“I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Come on, Squirt. Don’t pussy out now.”

“I think I’m going to throw up.”

“I’ll ring that doorbell myself if I have to.”

Wanda glares at him, and Peter might maybe be slightly nervous that her agitated state might cause something else to explode (like another Corvette, and if Peter survives the explosion, he won’t survive Erik’s wrath), so he takes her by the shoulders and tells her to take a deep breath.

“Hold it for the count of ten,” he explains, “and then let it out slowly for the count of ten.”

While Wanda works on her breathing, Peter gets a vivid flashback of him and Erik in this same car, the roles reversed. Who would have thought that Peter Maximoff, Fuck Up Extraordinaire, would be in any position to offer advice and leadership. Crazy how the universe works, you know?

After a few minutes of regulated breathing, Peter squeezes his sister’s shoulders.

“Now go and ring that fucking doorbell.”

Wanda nods and schools her face into fierce determination before climbing out of the car and marching towards the door like a World War One solider marches out of the trenches. Peter kicks the seat back, but he keeps a careful eye on the door, ready to speed Wanda away if it gets ugly or the girl’s parents freak out or something.

To their luck, Laura answers the door, looking a bit shell shocked at the sight of Wanda. The two girls stand in front of each other, both awkwardly hugging themselves before abruptly pulling each other into a tearful embrace. Peter rolls his eyes -- why do pre-teen girls have to make everything so dramatic? – but at least there isn’t any screaming.

Though his patience is rapidly running thin, Peter sits in the car and waits it out. He’s tempted to dash back down to his old house and slash some tires, maybe T.P. the place. Five years ago he wouldn’t have hesitated, but now he worries about jeopardizing this meeting with Laura if Carl ever suspected it was him and went out looking (and who else would it be, if someone’s house got magically defaced in under ten seconds?).

After nearly a goddamn eternity, in which Peter tapped out the rhythms to all his favorite Pink Floyd songs with his fingernails, the girls hug one last time and Wanda climbs back into the car, wiping her eyes. She waves out the window and Laura watches them drive off before heading back into the house.

“So . . .” Peter says. “How did it go?”

Wanda sucks in a shaky breath. “I needed that. Thank you, Peter.”

He waves this gratitude off. “No problem, whatever. Now tell me what the fuck happened.”

According to Wanda, Laura had been a little freaked out when the car exploded, but she was much more worried about Wanda, especially when Carl lost his shit, than about herself. When Wanda disappeared and never returned, Laura worried so hard that she often cried herself to sleep when she didn’t hear any news from Wanda. She was so worried, in fact, that she thought Carl might have arranged for Wanda’s kidnapping and assassination and called the police on him. Peter could throw Laura a fucking party for that alone.

The best part? Wanda had asked Laura what to do about the mutant school and Laura told her to go. Wanda admits this more reluctantly.

“She said what?” Peter tries to clarify.

For the past five years he’s been keeping a running score between Charles and Erik’s opposing attitudes towards humans. Despite the deep flaws in both men’s ideologies, they’ve remained pretty neck and neck for five years. But this incident would put Charles ahead at least until the nightly news.

Wanda scrunches her nose. “She said . . . she said that the school sounded like a place that would help me,” she recounts slowly. “And that, even though she would miss me, I should do what’s best for me.”

“Yeah?” Peter mentally adds a tally to Charles’ score board. Erik is gonna be so disappointed.

“Yeah.” Wanda leans her head up against the window.

The drive back is considerably quieter. Wanda stares at the darkening sky and the whizzing landscape, lost so far in thought that Peter had to call her name several times before handing her a sandwich. He listens to the radio, jumping between stations when they play songs he doesn’t like, and taps his thumbs on the steering wheel. Peter loves driving because it takes so much mental multitasking that he never feels bored.

Dinner is well over by the time they show up, but they find covered plates on the stove. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes, which meant that Hank cooked tonight. They dig in with relish, not bothering with the stove to reheat it. After they rinse off their plates Wanda takes off to the library with a not so subtle hint that she wants to be alone, and Peter tracks down Erik and Charles.

First he pops in to the den to find Hank and Raven cuddled up on the couch watching the news.

“Thanks for dinner, man. It was fucking tasty.”

Hank flushes a bit at the praise, especially since Peter used to make fun of the guy’s earliest efforts when they split up dinner duty a few years ago. Hank’s first Thanksgiving turkey is something Hank wishes Charles could strike from everyone’s memories.

“You’re welcome. Did everything go okay with Wanda?”

“Yeah, where is she?” Raven asks.

“Things went great,” replies Peter. “She’s in the library, being a nerd.”

Hank rolls his eyes but Raven smiles. “Tell her if she ever wants a break from being a nerd, she can watch T.V. with us in here.”

“Yeah, Raven does impressions of the newscasters and we make fun of them,” adds Hank.

Highly doubtful that Wanda would get her shy head out of her ass enough to interact with people who aren’t Laura or Peter, but he thanks them for thinking of her just the same. Then he hunts down Charles and Erik. The house is quiet, mainly because the majority of their students and teachers have all returned home for the weekend, even Jean and Scott.

He approaches the door of Erik’s study after failing to find them in the library with Wanda or the den or the terrace out back. His knuckles rap the door four times.

“Put your clothes back on, I’m coming in,” he says through the door.

Hand clapped over his eyes, Peter swings the door open and takes a few cautious steps in, banging his shin on the edge of the couch. He can practically feel Charles’ eye roll.

“We’re quite decent, Peter. No need for theatrics.”

Peter uncovers his eyes to find them sharing a bottle of wine on the couch.

“Besides,” Charles sniffs, “we keep our amorous activities to the bedroom like mature adults.”

“It’s wrong to lie, Charles, especially to your friends,” says Erik casually, a feral gleam in his eye.

“For the love of God, Charles, lie to me,” begs Peter.

Peter has had five years to come to terms with his father’s alarmingly active sex life, to the point where it doesn’t disgust him like it used to. But he keeps up appearances, mainly because it makes Erik laugh and Charles an excuse to be smug (not that Charles ever needs one).

“How did it go?” Charles asks, deftly changing the subject.

“Great.”

 He describes the visit, how awesome Wanda’s friend acted, and rolled his eyes when Erik looked visibly disappointed that a human showed any kind of empathy to a mutant and pointedly refused to make eye contact with Charles.

“Laura sounds wonderful,” says Charles. “Perhaps we can invite her up to the mansion one day.”

Erik snorts but doesn’t comment. Charles side eyes him before continuing.

“I’ll need to call her school and request her records. Meanwhile tomorrow we should drum up a class schedule for her and get her a dorm room set up. She can be across the hall from Jean. That poor girl has been trying to befriend Wanda for days.”

It finally settles in Peter’s head that Wanda is actually going to live with him full time. The realization buoys him, like he’s walking on air, and he actually smiles at baby Summers in the hallway, which thoroughly freaks the kid out.

Even though they’re ten and half years apart, Peter has always adored his little sister. Wanda’s the only person who ever looked up to him, who never lost faith in him, and for long stretches of Peter’s childhood, the only person who looked happy to see him. Yeah, he might have played too many tea parties or was forced to watch _Cinderella_ and _Sleeping Beauty_ an ungodly number of times on T.V. But that was all worth having Wanda for a sister.

Gaining Erik as a Dad is easily one of the best things that ever happened to Peter, but he always hated that it essentially cost him Wanda. Now he might never have to choose between them again.

 

 

Peter wakes up Monday morning at Fuck That o’clock, while the house is still quiet and the sky still dark. Breakfast usually starts at eight, classes and training start at nine, so Peter usually sleeps in until Erik forces him awake just before breakfast by clanging the bells Erik has hidden in various places.

But this morning he wants everything to be perfect so that Wanda has nothing to stress about (you know, besides the fact that she has to go back to school, like, at the beginning of her summer vacation). So he goes downstairs and starts making her French toast as the sun just barely peeks  over the trees. He would love to give her breakfast in bed, the way he used to on her birthdays, but technically she’s a student now and he can’t show that level of favoritism. So he has to make French toast for _everybody._

It’s a lot of goddamn toast.

Lucky for him, Erik strolls down for coffee at about the usual time for him, which is roughly half past Fuck That o’clock. His eyebrows jump when he catches sight of Peter.

“Nightmare?” he asks because that usually the reason anytime Peter is up before he absolutely has to be.

“Nope,” says Peter. “Just making Wanda’s favorite breakfast.”

Erik gives Peter one of his rare, tiny smiles, the one that means Peter has done or said something cute or endearing. Peter rolls his eyes because he’s twenty-fucking-two years old, not a precious toddler, but Erik has a lot of fatherhood to catch up on still, so it’s whatever.

“Do you need help?”

“Holy fuck, yes, or I’m never going to finish in time.”

So Erik forgoes his morning meditation and helps Peter mix eggs and cinnamon and vanilla extract in a bowl and busts out a second frying pan and dips the bread while Peter flips them. He also helps Peter stick bacon in the oven, and it’s shortly after that people begin filing in the kitchen and dining room, driven by the smell.

Everyone except for Wanda.

Jean sidles up to Peter and whispers, “I think I heard crying in Wanda’s room.”

Oh boy.

He catches Erik’s eye across the stove.

“Go,” says Erik.  “I’ll finish breakfast.”

 

Peter descends the stairs slowly, his mind flipping through the things Wanda could be upset about. The possibilities are endless, mysterious, and rather terrifying. He has no idea what goes on in a twelve-year-old girl’s head, much less one who’s gone through something traumatic. And even if he did know what could bother her, he still has no idea what the fuck to do about it.

Something hits the wall with a loud thud just as Peter approaches her door. He knocks hesitantly.

“Hey Wanda? Breakfast is almost ready. We made French toast.”

Wanda answers after a long silence.

“Yeah, I’ll be down in a minute,” she says, and Peter catches the faint sound of a sniffle.

He sighs and opens the door. Wanda stands in front of the mirror hanging on her closet door,

“What’s up?”

Wanda shrieks and turns around. “You can’t just waltz into my room anymore, Peter! I could have been naked!”

“I hope not 'cause then you’d be late for breakfast. Which I cooked, by the way. Especially for you.” Peter leans against her bed and crosses his arms. “Now what’s going on?”

Wanda sighs, and wipes her eyes. “It’s stupid, okay? I just . . . I want to look nice, for my first day, you know? But my _hair_. It’s so freaking . . . poofy and I hate it! It’s not doing anything I want! And I know everyone has already seen me and my stupid hair so it’s _pointless_ to even worry about this, but I feel so ugly and–“

And here come the tears, welling up in her eyes and spilling onto her cheeks. She wipes them furiously away and glares at her reflection, as if it betrayed her. Peter flounders for words because he has no idea how to tell his baby sister how pretty she is without it sounding weird.

“I’m sorry, Peter. It’s so stupid. I’ll be down in a minute, just let me get my backpack.”

Uh-uh. No way. Peter grabs the brush from behind the nightstand, noting the little dent in the wall above it, and comes up behind Wanda to brush her hair. Her locks are thick and curly and the brush gets stuck a couple times and yeah, it is totally poofy right now. And it’s getting poofier the more he brushes it. But it’s also a nice shade of deep, warm brown and shiny.

“Peter, what are you doing?”

“Remember when I used to braid your hair at night so you could have princess waves the next morning?” Peter asks her.

“That was a really long time ago.”

“Um, excuse you, Miss Grown Up, but three years is not that long ago.”

“It is when you’re not old.”

“ _Anyway_ , how about we try a braid now?”

Wanda shrugs. “Honestly, I can’t look any worse than this.”

Peter sets the brush down and combs his fingers through her hair, parting it into three parts. Her hair is ridiculously soft, like a lion’s mane (not that he’s ever touched a lion’s mane, but this is what a lion’s mane _should_ feel like). He begins threading the pieces together, taking his time because it’s been so long and he doesn’t want to screw it up. He zips to the night stand for a hair tie and zips back before her hair has time to unbraid itself and when he finally ties it off, it trails over her shoulder like thick rope and it gleams. A few curls slip away to frame her face. Adorable.

Wanda inspects his work in the mirror.

“Thanks. It looks fine.”

Fine? _Fine?_ Peter sighs.Whatever.

“Hurry up, Squirt. Breakfast is getting cold.”

 

Jean admires Wanda’s hair and tells her how jealous she is of Wanda’s thickness at the breakfast table.

“My hair is so thin,” she adds, her face scrunching. “My braids look pitiful. Not full like yours.”

Wanda flushes and says nothing but gives Jean a small, grateful smile.

Peter vows that Jean will get a perfect A in Gym, even if she can’t run a mile in under fifteen minutes and Scott can just suck it.

 

Wanda settles in okay.

He doesn’t know if she cries at night anymore, because he resists the temptation to slip into her room and press an ear to her door when he’s roaming the halls at night. That would be weird. But he finds her in the library some nights and they read together and Peter doesn’t ask any questions, even if her nose is red or if she sniffles a bit.

The first evening of her first day, Charles brings in a cake at dinner to celebrate. He does this with every new student, and he gives Wanda the biggest slice. She stutters her thanks, bright red in the face, and then buries her attention in her cake. Peter steals bites of her icing. Jean generously shares _her_ icing, which she always scrapes off her cake, with Wanda.

Even so, it takes surviving Gym class to finally kickstart the Epic Friendship of Wanda and Jean. Being the only girl for so long, Jean is over the fucking moon about having another girl to talk to. To Raven’s disappointment, Jean does the bare minimum required in anything physical, preferring to use her mind rather than her body for just about anything. Unlike the boys, she’s not motivated by competition and she hates sports and she falls laughably short in every partner exercise. Peter never hears a peep of protest out of her, and she always participates, no matter what activity they do, but he can tell that she hates every minute of his class. 

Now, not only does Jean have someone more on her level, but also someone who hates gym as much as she does. She and Wanda fucking _walk_ the mile run, talking and giggling while Pitor laps them. They instantly pair up for crunches or weight lifting or hoops and they cheer each other on during kickball and basketball. It’s infuriating from a teacher’s standpoint, but Peter can’t get mad when he sees Wanda slowly coaxed more and more out of her shell.

After a few days, she joins Jean in watching T.V. and lets Jean play with her hair and sometimes they bust out the cards and play Crazy Eights.

As Peter predicted, once Wanda started engaging in academics, she got deadly serious. She starts all her homework the day she receives it, regardless of the due date, and sometimes works on it in the library at night instead of reading.

One day, a week after she started, Peter spies her out on the terrace with Pitor and Warren, erasing something off of Pitor’s paper.

“Is she doing _homework_? On a _Saturday?_ ”

“She’s tutoring,” says Charles, beaming. “Your sister is brilliant. If I didn’t have my doctorate in genetics, I would question how the two of you are related.”

“Thanks,” says Peter dryly.

“Seriously, though, if she didn’t need so much social skill development with her peers, I’d seriously consider bumping her up a grade or two. As it is, I’m thinking about creating an advanced literature independent study for her.”

“God, you fucking nerds are killing me,” he says.

But pride swells his chest up so much it must be visible from space.

As far as her powers go, nothing has happened. Nothing. At all. Nearly every evening she and Charles go down into the futuristic basement and practice, but Charles says her powers have not manifested a second time.

“I believe she has a mental block,” says Charles, “which requires such delicacy to undo that I prefer she takes it down herself. It will take time.”

But to Peter it’s like Wanda’s entirely human. She can’t be, of course, because humans can’t fucking blow up cars with their mind.

But Peter wonders, sometimes, if maybe she is human, if maybe the car thing is some kind of fluke. Spontaneous combustion is highly, _highly_ unlikely, but it’s not impossible, according to Hank. Peter doesn’t think Charles would kick Wanda out if she turned out to be human, and Peter wouldn’t love her any less, but . . . he can’t help but get seriously disappointed at the thought.

He voices these concerns with Erik one night in the study, which is a risk to be sure because Erik could say something totally asshole-ish about Wanda not belonging or being lesser than and then Peter would have to kick his ass.

But Erik surprises Peter. As usual.

“She’s your sister. Family. You have a strong bond with her, Peter, and you developed that love with her before she could have possibly manifested. You love her for a multitude of reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not she has a mutation. If Wanda does turn out to be disappointingly ordinary, your bond won’t change because it wasn’t built on her mutation.”

“I like the idea of sharing that with her,” he protests.

Erik inclines his head in agreement. “Of course you do. But you two had a good relationship for years after you manifested. You don’t need that in common to keep your relationship. Besides, the two of you have countless other shared experiences to draw upon.”

A pocket of relief pops in his chest, spreading, calming him.

“If she does turn out to be human . . . could she still stay at the school?” Peter closes his eyes, almost afraid of Erik’s answer.

“I don’t see why not,” Erik says slowly. “She benefits from the academics here and also her proximity to you.”

Peter wants to pinch himself to see if he’s dreaming.

“You wouldn’t have a problem with that? A human, mixed in with a bunch of mutants? A human, invading one of the only safe spaces of mutants,” he adds, parroting a line of argument Erik had when Charles first wanted to invite non-mutant teachers.

“I didn’t have a problem with Wanda all those times she visited you,” snaps Erik. Is he getting _offended_? “Her value does not solely rely on whether or not she has a mutation!”

Peter’s jaw drops. “I cannot believe those words, in that order, came out of _your mouth,_ holy shit! Do you have a fever or something?”

Erik squirms in his chair and looks away. “I have realized many things in the last few years,” he says after a long bout of silence. “One of them being the hypocrisy that lies in accusing humans of condemning mutants as a whole and then doing the same to the humans.”

Peter is speechless. Like, utterly fucking speechless, which has happened approximately three times in his entire life.

“Charles must give you some seriously mind-blowing sex because I don’t know how you would ever come to that decision,” he says finally.

Erik actually _blushes_ , which equates to a faint redness on either side of his nose, but still! That counts!

“Or perhaps I have learned to make exceptions for humans who prove worthy,” Erik says. “Your mother and possibly your sister being among them.”

That makes more sense.

“I’m proud of you,” says Peter seriously. “It takes a lot of maturity to reevaluate yourself like that.”

“And how would you even know,” Erik retorts, but a smile overtakes his lips.

 

Of course, just when Peter has given her up as human, all the crazy shit starts happening.


	2. Chapter 2

See, the thing about Wanda is that she’s super competitive.

Peter is not competitive. Either his powers give him such an advantage that he will always win, which is boring, or his powers don’t factor in at all and he just chills and has a good time and maybe fist pumps the air if he scores. But it’s whatever, you know? He just wants to have fun.

Wanda does not want to have fun. Wanda wants to pulverize her opponent into a fine powder and then mix that into a smoothie before she crushes her next competition. The way she narrows her eyes when she gets in the zone kind of scares Peter, even when she was five, which is why he stopped playing ping pong with her. She used to throw screaming tantrums when she lost. Thank God she couldn’t blow anything up back then.

He should have remembered this when he paired her and Scott up for hundred meter dash races. He had started splitting Wanda and Jean up for certain activities in hopes that the girls might actually _do_ something for once. He also should have remembered that Scott is _also_ insanely competitive, and too late he realizes that this will not end well.

But he’s already committed.

“On your mark,” he says, raising his arm in the air. “Get set . . . GO!” He throws his arm down.

To his utter shock, Wanda digs her heels in and launches down the path, head bent, arms tight beside her body, moving faster that Peter thought possible (now she’ll never get away with walking the mile run). But Scott had taken off just a hair before Peter had shouted “go” and that gave him enough of an edge to keep Wanda at his heels.

They skid to a halt at the end and Wanda immediately gives Scott a filthy glare.

“He started before you said ‘go’!” she shrieks. “He _cheated_. I demand a rematch!”

“I did not!” Scott protests, but his cheeks flush in guilt. Scott’s an obsessive rule follower, so Peter doesn’t think the kid did it on purpose, and only the embarrassment of getting accused in front of Jean would push him to lie.

“Wanda’s right. Rematch!”

He makes them trudge back to the starting line and gives them a moment to catch their breath before they crouch back down.

“On your mark . . . Get set . . .” Peter waits, making sure that nobody false starts again, and then shouts, “Go!”

Just as he thought, Wanda and Scott stay neck and neck almost the entire way, neither give the other so much as a milliliter of lead. Neither kid would accept a tie, but they might have to just suck it up because this race is unbelievably close and why did he ever pair them up in the first place?

Then something flashes in the corner of Peter’s vision – purple? – and Scott’s visor falls down his face. The boy immediately covers his eyes, but not before his laser vision gouges a deep slice of the earth in front of him, dirt flying everywhere. He drops down to his knees and Jean rushes over to Scott, picking the visor up off the ground and putting it in his searching hands.

 Meanwhile, Wanda tears down the path, either unaware of or straight up ignoring Scott, and wins with a  
“wahoo!” and a fist pump. She turns around when she realizes no one else is celebrating. Her eyes track the slash in the ground, to Scott kneeling, adjusting his visor.

“What happened?”

Scott jumps to his feet the second his visor is secured and throws an accusing finger at Wanda. “You! You pulled my visor off with your powers!”

“ _What?_ I did not!”

“How else do you explain it? My visor _never slips_.”

Wanda’s face grows pale. “That’s not – my powers don’t do that.”

She gives Peter a stricken, begging look that breaks his heart.

“No one knows _what_ your powers do,” Scott snarls.

Tears fill Wanda’s eyes.

“Hey,” Peter snaps at Scott but doesn’t chastise him when he notices the kid’s hands shaking.  “Class is dismissed,” he says instead. “Everyone go back to the mansion and read a book or some shit.”

Everyone disperses, but Peter grabs Scott’s shoulders and forces him to hang back. The hard set of Scott’s jaw implies barely withheld tears.

“What’s up?” Peter asks.

“Nothing,” Scott snaps. “I’m fine. Let me go.”

Peter fights the urge to heave a long-suffering sigh, which would probably just piss off Scott even more.

“Scott,” Peter tries to make his voice sound gentle and trustworthy, the way Charles does. It’s not a good fit for him. “You’re not fine.”

Silence. Scott swallows hard, his nubbin of an Adam’s apple bobbing heavily.

“I could have killed her,” he finally whispers, and his bottom lip trembles.

Peter’s heart twists in his chest. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. This is a hot mess.

He claps a hand on Scott’s shoulder. “Look at me,” he says, and Scott reluctantly meets his eyes. “Nothing bad happened. Everyone is fine. Accidents are going to happen all the time, and all that matters is how you react, and you reacted exactly the way you were supposed to. Okay?”

Scott hesitates and then nods. Which is the best Peter could hope for because he sure as shit is not Charles.

 

He catches Wanda after classes end and pulls her into an empty hallway.

“You okay?” he asks her even though it’s a stupid question and her wide, sad eyes announce that answer.

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispers. “I don’t know what happened.”

He rests a hand on her back. “I know, Squirt. I know. Look, I know you really look forward to doing your homework, but how about we go to my super-secret hide out and play some pinball?”

His super-secret hideout is a storage room near Cerebro that contains his beloved pinball machine that Mom carted all the way up here when it became clear Peter wasn’t ever going back home. Charles lets him hide in here so no other baby mutants break the thing with their erratic powers and because it’s one of the most precious things Peter owns, besides the t-shirts his dad bought him. Besides his machine, the room houses leftover scraps of metal Erik won’t get rid of and some random lab equipment of Hank’s.

When he had the pinball machine at their old house, Wanda was too short to play it so sometimes he would hold her up by her armpits while she slammed and yanked the cue stick. Now they take turns trying to beat the other’s high score.

Peter should have watched his mouth, to be honest. That disastrous race with Scott should have taught him not to antagonize her but he forgets himself. He can’t help but trash talk her during her turns. He’ll lean up somewhere near the front of the machine, grinning, and say things like “Oooooh, close but no cigar, darling” and “Jesus, how could you miss a shot like _that_?”

She gets more and more frustrated as Peter trounces her score on his every turn and flaunts his superior experience and skills. Her eyes get that same flash of determination before she raced Scott a second time and that should have warned him.

But he doesn’t pay attention to any of that, so it catches him off guard when the machine smokes and the glass bulbs shatter inside.

“What the hell!” He smacks the side of the machine in an instinctual effort to bring it back to life. “No! _No!”_

Wanda gasps. “Oh my God!”

Peter whirls around to find his sister holding a horrified hand to her mouth.

“Wanda?” he asks, voice faltering .

“I’m so sorry! I don’t know what happened!”

He looks at the smoldering wreckage of his pinball machine and his chest clenches.

“That’s how it always is,” he snaps. “How fucking convenient for you!”

He regrets the words right after they come out of his mouth, but there is no taking them back.

“It’s not my fault!” she screams at him. “I don’t _know_ how any of this stuff is happening and I can’t help it! And if you can’t understand that then you should just – you should just – fuck right off!”

Peter’s mouth falls open at the expletive. He takes a moment to scoop his jaw from the fucking floor before he reaches out to her.

“Wanda, I’m so sorry –”

She jerks away from him like he would burn her. “Stay away from me! Don’t touch me! I don’t – I don’t know what would happen to you!”

“Wanda –“

She flees the room and Peter just sinks to the floor, head in his hands.  He struggles valiantly not to cry himself. He thought coming here would help Wanda, he thought _he_ could help Wanda, but he can’t. He doesn’t see how any of them can help her and he hates himself.

Erik finds Peter with his head still buried in his knees and sits down beside him, his hand a heavy and grounding weight on the back of Peter’s shoulder. He finds himself pulled against Erik.

“Charles is talking to Wanda,” he tells Peter. “I can fix the machine.”

Peter huffs against Erik’s shoulder “I don’t care about the machine.”

“I’ll still fix it.”

They sit like that for a while, Erik offering reassurances with the kind of super special Dad powers that allow him to read Peter’s mind without telepathy.

“Wanda will learn mastery and control. It just takes trial and error. Not everyone has an easy and obvious power like you.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

“She will. She has three geniuses and a telepath in this house. Trust me, Charles can reach even the most stubborn pupils. I’ve seen it happen.”

Then he and Erik lay under the machine like it was an old car while Erik slowly takes it apart and investigates the electrical shortage that fried it. It’s really cool to stare up at the mishmash of wires and colored glass and hidden pathways where the ball travels. Erik sweeps away the broken glass and inspects the burnt wires.

Peter flicks his gaze from the machine over to Erik’s profile, following the slope of Erik’s sharp nose, the furrows in his forehead as he concentrates, and the deepening lines of his crows feet. Warm affection surges through him.

“I love you, Dad. Thanks for everything,”

Erik flinches, blinking hard, his sharp intake of breath loud without the quiet hum of the machine. Peter doesn’t say those kinds of things often, mainly because by now he doesn’t need to. But it takes Erik by surprise every time, and it breaks Peter’s heart a little that, even after five years, Erik still doesn’t quite believe that people care about him.

“I – I love you too,” he replies gruffly.

Peter kind of wants to say it again, to tell Erik how awesome he finds him, until he’s so used to it that it doesn’t faze him. But Erik would probably spark and shut down like the pinball machine if Peter did, so he changes the subject.

“What’s the prognosis, Doc?”

“I’ll pick up some replacement parts Saturday, and we’ll have this fixed in no time at all.”

“Fucking ace, man.”

 

Wanda avoids him all the next morning, even through breakfast, and skips off to her first class without making any eye contact. To keep tempers from fraying even more within the group, Peter uses their gym period to weed out Charles’ garden. That’s relaxing, right? Between the sun and the anxiety that comes from not wanting to fuck up and accidentally yank one of Charles’ precious flowers, the period passes quietly. Peter ambushes Wanda and drags her away from Jean to the side of the house.

“This is bullshit,” he tells her. “I can’t have you not talk to me. I’m sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” says Wanda, her voice wobbling. “I didn’t mean to break it. I know how much you loved it, how important it was to you.”

Peter is reminded of Carl’s red corvette, and he tries to keep the scowl from his face. God, he’s an asshole. No wonder Wanda got so upset. He gathers her in a hug.

“It’s a machine. A toy. It’s not as important as you, okay? It never will be.”

Wanda nods against his chest and pulls away.

“We square?” Peter asks.

“We’re square.”

 

 

 

A few days later, Hank becomes Wanda’s next victim.

Peter wasn’t there and he tends to zone out when Hank mouths about chemicals so he doesn’t fully understand what happened, but _apparently_ , two mostly unreactive chemicals became suddenly very reactive when Wanda put them together when she volunteered for a class demonstration. It blew a chunk out of the ceiling tiles and burned and cut both Wanda and Hank.

He catches up with them in the infirmary as Hank bandages them up.

“I just don’t understand it,” Hank says as he gently coats burn cream on Wanda’s arm. “I’ve done that experiment for years, with countless students. I’ve never had a reaction like that.”

“It’s probably my fault,” Wanda mutters.

“Absolutely not,” Hank protests before Peter can. “You’re brilliant, Wanda. You did the experiment perfectly. It’s just a spot of bad luck, I suppose, though the odds of this happening are astronomical . . .”

Wanda blushes when Hank cradles her hand to wrap it in gauze and whooo boy. Peter is going to pretend he didn’t see that because that’s a conversation he hopes to God he never has. Or maybe he should, to warn her off, because he doesn’t want to imagine the inadequacy issues a twelve-year-old girl would get when her romantic competition is a hot naked woman who could look like _anyone_.

 

The last straw ends up being Scott. Again. It’s like the universe has decreed that he become the punching bag to Wanda’s powers.

Okay, look. It’s not Peter’s fault. He knows now – fuck, _everybody knows_ now – that Scott and Wanda have a “thing.” An I-Want-To-Kill-You-But-I-Don’t-Want-To-Disappoint-Jean kind of thing. Rivalry is too light a word for it. Maybe eternal hatred works better.

Charles says it’s because Wanda and Scott are fighting over Jean’s attention. Whatever. But their competition spills over into every class. They fight over who gets the highest grades, who raises their hand first, who answers the most questions, who passes Charles the fucking salt at dinner. Anything.

It’s annoying as shit and they’ve both had separate meetings with Charles about it, especially after the race debacle, but neither one would rat out the other. It’s like their hatred is so intense they won’t let anyone else interfere. It’s a fucked up kind of loyalty.

But, point being, their hate is unpreventable. It’s like the tide blasting up against those scary rock cliffs. No force on this universe can stop it. So, like Peter said, it’s not really his fault that the last straw happened because what the fuck is he supposed to do against the Tide of Eternal Hatred?

So a couple of weeks after The Race, Peter sticks them out on the field with a goal that Erik helped him make and had them play  “soccer” (it’s “soccer” with quotations because it’s really just three kids and one goalie kicking a ball around but whatever). Jean runs away from the ball every time it comes near her (which, to be far, Peter would also do if Pitor was kicking), so Peter makes Wanda the goalie. The two girls can’t be on the field at the same time because they just hang back and gossip while Pitor and Scott wrestle the ball from each other and Warren smacks people in the face with his wings.

The second Peter puts Wanda and Scott on opposing sides, something changes. He can feel it in the air, a special charge, the kind that makes his hair stands up on the back of his neck when a storm builds up.

As the game progresses it’s clear that Wanda has made her mission in life to keep Scott from ever scoring a point. She puts in considerably less effort in blocking out Jean. Actually, she makes no effort in blocking out Jean, allowing her to score a point when Scott generously gives her the ball and then they both cheer and high five, and Peter rolls his fucking eyes.

It’s equally clear that it’s Scott’s mission in life to kick the ball through Wanda’s goddamn head and into the goal. He becomes a ball stealing, dribbling machine. Even Pitor can’t keep up and that kid’s a Mack truck. Jean doesn’t get a second chance either, but she seems more than content to run around the field after Scott and watch the drama unfold.

Wanda has no experience with being a goalie, though, but her teeth-gritting determination makes up for her lack of skill. Even so, eventually Scott manages to score a point because Wanda accidentally hits the ball into her own goal.

“That doesn’t count!” she yells immediately, and here we go.

“Does so! Don’t be a sore loser,” Scott retorts.

They both turn to look at Peter. He groans.

“It counts, Wanda,” he says. “Sorry.”

Wanda shoots Scott the most poisonous glare Peter has ever seen, which looks positively terrifying on her sweet face. Scott’s visor makes it difficult to gauge his expression, but the sneer on the boys’ lips is unmistakable.

“Fine,” she spits. “You got lucky, Summers. That’s all.”

Everyone goes back to their respective positions and in no time at all Scott barrels down the field towards Wanda like a runaway freight train. He rears his foot back and gives the ball a vicious, utterly _fantastic_ kick. It sails straight for Wanda’s head like a bullet, and Peter could stop it but frankly he’s immobilized by this fucking drama-filled train wreck.

That’s when something crazy happens.

Wanda throws her hands up, instinctively, and something purple and glow-y sprouts from her fingers, covering it, and when she hits the ball with her fist it flies straight back to Scott’s head like a boomerang, hitting him in the face and knocking him flat on his ass.

The kid is out cold.

Like _what the fuck was that?!_ Peter has to take a second to work out the logistics because it looked impossible. Scott had hit the ball at an angle, but Wanda wasn’t facing him when she hit it back, so how the fuck did the ball hit Scott? Like, Wanda had the entire fucking field stretched out in front of her but it hits Scott in the face?

Meanwhile, everyone else is freaking out.

“Oh my God! Scott! Scott wake up!”

Jean rushes over to the kid, whose nose is bleeding profusely. Scott eventually sits woozily up and promptly pukes all over Jean’s shorts. That’s when Peter dashes back up to the mansion to grab Hank, who doesn’t seem the least bit surprised that something else has happened. He bends down and inspects Scott, probing the kid’s head with gentle fingers and giving him a handkerchief to stem the bleeding. Scott refuses to look anyone in the eye, especially Jean.

“You probably have a concussion,” Hank says. “Let’s get you back the infirmary and clean you up. Pitor, can you help escort us?”

Scott stumbles after Hank, held up by Pitor’s steady arm. Peter turns to the rest of the class, which consists of Jean fretting, Warren looking longingly at his male classmates, and Wanda looking like she wants to hurl herself off a cliff.

He loves Wanda. He knows none of this is her fault, exactly. But even he is getting tired of the chaos that follows her around.

 

That afternoon, right after classes end, Charles calls for a council of Wanda’s teachers because no one knows what the fuck is going on with her powers. They put together every instance of something strange that happened since she got here, but none of it makes any goddamn sense. So far Wanda blew up a car, nearly took Scott’s head off with a soccer ball, shorted out Peter’s pinball machine, and caused two mostly unreactive chemicals to explode. Not to mention all the shit that randomly falls apart around her. She’s gone through three desks and two chairs already.

None of that shit is related to each other.

“I don’t fucking get it,” says Peter. “She wasn’t showing any signs of powers for a long time. You said there was some kind of a block. Now crazy shit happens almost every day? What’s going on?”

“It’s apparent that the more she accepts her situation and the more comfortable she grows here, the more that block lessens,” Charles explains. “But, like all mutants, her powers are mostly caused by bursts of intense emotion. Right now that seems to be mainly anger and frustration.”

“Is it normal for a mutant’s power to be this random?” Raven asks. “I can’t pin down what she’s capable of.”

“There must be a pattern,” Charles insists. “It can’t be this erratic.”

“What if that is her power,” says Erik. “What if her powers are different each time she uses them because that’s the nature of her mutation?”

Charles frowns. “That would be very unfortunate indeed. A power like that would be almost impossible to master. But I want to exhaust all other options before we decide on that. In the meantime, we need to give Wanda tools to calm her emotional outbursts. Perhaps the incidents will lessen.”

“Leave that to me,” says Erik immediately.

Everyone turns to look at him because, let’s be frank, Erik is not exactly the poster boy for controlling emotional outbursts. But no one argues with the determined glint in the mans’ eyes, not even Charles. He holds Erik’s gaze for a moment and then said the matter was decided and dismissed everyone.

 

Erik doesn’t waste any time. After dinner, while everyone else clears out, he takes Wanda aside. Peter hangs back, of course.

“After you help clean up, you will meet with me in the library,” Erik tells her. “I have a special assignment for you.”

Wanda glances over at Peter because being the sole recipient of Erik’s attention is fucking intimidating for those who aren’t used to it. And Erik picks up on this right away, probably because he’s been intimidating people since he was born. He probably looked like the most pissed off baby in the world.

“Peter can come as well. He’s done this before. I’m going to teach you to meditate.”

Peter groans out loud. “Ugh. Fuck no. Please.”

“Is it – is it that bad?” Wanda asks nervously.

“It’s boring as shit.”

“It’s useful,” Erik retorts. “This is mandatory, Wanda. I will see you at seven thirty sharp.”

 

Wanda shows up at the library at seven thirty, on the fucking dot, like she waited outside the door with a watch. Peter went up after M.A.S.H. to read for a while with Erik and make fun of the fact that Erik is reading _The Once and Future King_ for, like, the gazillionth fucking time.

Erik has already prepared the library, setting two seat cushions on the floor against the back of the couch. Erik, who never actually uses cushions himself, could probably comfortably meditate on top of a flag pole. He gestures for her to sit.

“This is an introductory lesson,” he tells Wanda. “I’m going to teach you the techniques for a while and then we will try a short session. After this, I would like you to meditate with me every morning for the next week before I allow you to do it on your own.”

Wanda nods and Erik begins with light stretches, mainly the arms, neck, and legs. Then he works on her posture.

“Your back should be straight, even when you are relaxed. Don’t follow your brother’s example. He’s shamelessly appalling and he does it on purpose.”

Peter tries to look offended. “I would never!”

Both Erik and Wanda ignore him. She models Erik’s pose, crossing her legs, aligning her spine, and resting her hands palm upwards on her knees. Peter falls back into the familiar pose with surprising ease, even though it’s been over a year since he meditated.

“Meditation gives you peace and awareness through singular focus. Such focus allows your mind to discard all distractions and quiet itself. That kind of peace can give you the awareness and the strength to examine and sort through your emotions. Tonight I want you to focus on your breathing. You don’t need to regulate it, just be aware of it. The goal is to empty your mind. Let’s begin.”

Erik closes his eyes, and Wanda and Peter follow suit. At first Peter tries to actually meditate, but he soon abandons that entirely in favor of sneaking glances at Wanda. At first she does okay, even though Peter can tell she’s putting too much effort to making her breaths even and exact. But after a couple minutes, Peter can tell something is wrong. Her posture tightens back up, her fingers curl into her palms and her breathing becomes erratic and jerky.

Erik is watching her, too, and they share concerned looks.

“Wanda,” he says softly, “is something wrong?”

“No,” she replies but her voice sounds tight and high pitched. “I’m fine. I’m just . . . having a hard time focusing. But I’ll get it. Let me try again.”

“You are not fine. You are overwhelmed by negative emotions because you’ve been ignoring them. This is the cause of your power outbursts, and you will never gain control until you’ve confronted them.”

Wanda’s lip starts to tremble, but she stares resolutely at the back window and says nothing.

“I was afraid of my emotions for a long time,” Erik says. “I only ever allowed my anger, and I thought it was enough. But it’s never enough, Wanda, and no one can repress their feelings indefinitely. They will break free, and if you don’t deal with them, they will destroy you and everything you love.”

Wanda breaks.

Her face crumples, tears streaming, chest heaving. “I already do that!” she sobs. “I destroy things, I hurt people! I can’t con-control it, I can’t stop it. Scott’s a jerk b-but I didn’t want to h-hurt him! But that’s all I can do and I _hate_ myself. I’m _horrible. I’m a monster!_ ”

If Peter took his heart and ripped it out of his own asshole, put it in a blender on high, and mixed the remains with shattered glass and swallowed it whole, it would hurt less than this. Being set on fire would hurt less than this. Getting all of his goddamn fingernails pulled out, _again,_ would hurt less than this.

But before Peter can do anything, Erik crouches in front of her and frames her sweet, tiny face in his hands, thumbs swiping away tears as they fall. His eyes burn with his own fervor.

“Listen to me, Wanda. You are no monster. I’ve known monsters. I’ve _been_ a monster. You are too beautiful, too intelligent, too kind. You shine bright as a star. You are _perfection_. Never be ashamed of your powers; they are a part of you as much as your soul and your mind. You _will_ master them, and you _will_ do great and amazing things with them because _you_ are great and amazing. Do you understand?”

Wanda launches herself at Erik and buries her face in his chest and sobs and sobs and sobs. Erik wraps his arms around her and holds her, rocking ever so slightly. He closes his eyes.

Meanwhile Peter sits there, as useful as a screen door in a submarine, while Wanda cries out a months’ worth of repressed self-loathing.

Jealousy flashes up – after all, Wanda always came to him when something upset her and he works hard to comfort her – but then he discards it. He can picture Erik in the same position with a fussy Anya after a long night. He would have held her through all her bad breakups and stupid friendship spats and arguments with her mother if he could. Peter hates that the world took that from him, on top of everything else he lost. Between Peter and Charles, Erik has regained so much of what he lost, but neither of them can give Erik another daughter.

Eventually Wanda runs out of tears. She pulls away, rubbing at her eyes, and Erik looks reluctant to let her go. Wanda frowns at his chest.

“I got your shirt wet. I’m sorry,” she says, flushing.

“It’s nothing,” says Erik. “Do you feel better?”

“Yes,” she breathes. “God, yes. Can I . . . can I try again? At meditating?”

“Of course.”

Erik returns to his position beside her, and they both resume the lotus pose. Wanda looks much more loose now, more relaxed. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.

“Empty your mind of everything, save for your own breathing, your own proof of existence,” Erik murmurs.

They sit like that for fucking ever. They sit like that, in utter silence, barely even twitching, for so long that Peter gives up waiting them out and zooms to the kitchen for some ice cream. Whatever. They’ll come find him.

 

After that Wanda looks at Erik like the man invented the fucking universe. She wakes up at six a.m., no complaints, to meditate with him every morning on the back terrace. She sits next to him at dinner sometimes and passes the salt without him even having to ask for it. She works on his homework assignments first, even though math bores her and she _lives_ for Charles’ independent study.

Peter even walked in on Erik teaching her how to play chess in the library for fuck’s sake.

Younger Peter would have been fucking seething. Like, these are his two most favorite people in the world and the more time they spend with each other, the less time they spend with him. But he nixes that pretty much immediately. Erik’s been a good dad, all things considered. She needs a good dad. Wanda perks up in the face of his praise and his rare smiles (which are considerably less rare for her) like a wilted plant brought out into the sunlight.

Instead Peter worries that all this new attention might irritate Erik, who takes his personal space _very_ seriously. But Erik has only smiles and patience for Wanda. It gets to the point where the other students interrogate Wanda about her “secret.” Flushed with all this sudden attention, Wanda usually just mutters something about breathing exercises and doing her homework before ducking away. In the eyes of her classmates, her new friendship with Erik looks ballsy as hell and gains her a weird sort of respect.

After a week of meditation the incidents with Wanda’s powers drop and Scott’s life expectancy raises significantly. Peter dreaded having them in class together again once Scott made it out of the infirmary, but apparently the two hashed their beef out while Scott was laid up, and now they regard each other with cool cordiality for the sake of Jean and Wanda stops trying to subconsciously murder him.

 

Even though Peter would _never_ admit it to Charles (which wouldn’t matter because Charles could just hear it in his head anyway) sometimes the guy’s disgustingly optimistic view of the world is true. Sometimes, just when you run out of hope, the universe cuts you a break.

Whenever this story gets repeated, Peter can’t help but get unbearably smug because he’s the one that finally figured it out. It wasn’t the guy with three doctorates, or the scientist who worked for the fucking CIA, or even the two people who traveled all over the world and saw all kinds of crazy shit. Nope. No siree. It was the kid with the Phys. Ed. Degree, so everyone can just suck it.

It happens a couple of weeks after the meditation starts. Dark clouds roll in during the mile run (or walk, if you’re Jean and Wanda), and by the end of class the storm sits only minutes away. Peter and Wanda have watched a zillions storms together and tonight is no different. They curl up against the French doors overlooking the terrace and watch the curtain of rain travel steadily towards them. Lightning flashes, great cracks ripping the sky, and they both love the way the resulting thunder vibrates in their chests like God’s bass amp.

“You want some ice cream?” Peter asks. He doesn’t wait for her answer – which is always yes – and dashes to the kitchen to rummage the Moose Tracks out of the fridge.

 _CRACK_!!!!

Peter nearly jumps out of his fucking skin at the holy noise that rattles the kitchen, a sound so loud and explosive that he jerks back and covers his ears even though he’s been to three Pink Floyd concerts. Wanda squeals from the next room and he zips back over to her, ice cream rolling on the kitchen floor.

“Lightning just hit that tree!” Wanda cries, pointing out the window.

One of the stodgy old oaks in the backyard now has a smoking black gash down its middle, tiny licks of flame quickly doused out by the rain.

“Fuck! I missed it!” Peter smacks his hand against the window pane. That would have been _cool as shit._

“It was _amazing._ ”

“Yeah. Thanks. Rub it in.”

She doesn’t. Instead, Wanda cocks her head to the side and slowly gets up and walks out the French doors.

Wanda cocks her head to the side and opens the French doors. Rain lashes in, heavy and cold, but Wanda ignores it. She reaches her hand up, purple light covering it like a glove, and a bolt of lightning streaks down like she ripped it from the sky.

It hits the oak tree again, slicing it right down the middle in the exact same spot. Chunks of wood explode all over the lawn and one of its biggest limbs falls with another mighty crack.

Stunned silence follows. Peter sits with his jaw literally hanging for several minutes, staring at the blackened gouges like scrapes from a monster’s claws.

Wanda dashes out into the rain, her hair flattening under the strength of the downpour. Peter follows immediately after -- Is she fucking crazy? She stops under what’s left of the tree, stepping over shattered bits of trunk. Peter can smell campfires and the strange acid scent of ozone.

“How the fuck did you do that?”

“I don’t know.” Wanda sounds strange. Dreamy in a way that makes Peter want to investigate her bathroom cabinets. “I just felt . . .weird. Kind of crackling . . . like that lightning.”

 “You sound like a five-year-old explaining explosive diarrhea.” He snickers.

“Shut up,” she says, but with no heat. She places her hand on the scarred trunk, careful to avoid the still smoking gouges.

 The idea of his baby sister controlling the weather scares the shit out of him. But what else explains lightning hitting the same fucking tree in the _same fucking spot?_

What are the odds of that even happening?

 

 

And that’s when it hits Peter, like, well . . .like fucking lightning.

Odds.

What are the odds that a car spontaneously combusts? Or Scott’s visor slips, or two chemicals that Hank picked especially for the safety would react, or a soccer ball curving and smashing Scott’s face? What are the odds that Peter’s pinball machine would frizz out?

It seemed so random, all these freak accidents, but they do have one thing in common: extremely low odds.

Wanda can manipulate probability.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My God, how I struggled through the ending of this chapter! Sorry it's later than I intended, but that ending. Ugh.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My God I had no intention of taking this long to finish this fic! But being a first year teacher guarantees that I have no life whatsoever. I'm sorry for the late update, but the fic is finished!

Charles makes one thing clear almost immediately.

“You cannot take Wanda to buy lottery tickets.”

 “ _What?!_ You can’t be serious!”

Goddamn telepaths.

“I’m perfectly serious, Peter. It’s an abuse of power and your sister is a minor.”

“It’s _a shit ton of money!_ Come on, we could use it for the school! Wanda could wait in the car!”

“Absolutely not, and I doubt very seriously that you would donate all of your winnings to the school.”

“Well, I would take a cut, obviously. But it would be tiny. Like, thirty percent.”

“ _No_. And if I catch you sneaking out, Peter, God help you.”

So Charles killed that dream. But whatever. Wanda will be of legal lottery-buying age in six years. Peter can wait.

But, really, genius break through and all, things don’t get any easier. Wanda’s powers have always been erratic and crazy – now there’s just an official explanation for it. So how do you train a mutant when no one can predict the outcome of her powers?

Carefully. Duh. Everyone here has witnessed enough destruction from her powers as it is (Peter’s beloved pinball machine bearing literal scars).

It starts out small. Erik hauls an old black and white  T.V. out of the attic and hooks it up in one of the classrooms. Wanda stays in that room for over an hour trying to do . . .something. Charles is vague on the details. Eventually she blows the screen out by some freak electrical accident and starts a fire, which makes Charles happy and literally nobody else.

He takes her out to the garden and she kills his hydrangeas, which makes him considerably less happy.

Peter has her hit baseballs until she shatters the window to Erik’s study behind her (the ball bounced off a fucking tree, can you believe it?) and then they both decide to go on a spur-of-the-moment milkshake run into town. For several hours.

Maybe Charles thought she needed something more challenging. Or maybe he’s as vain as an old Hollywood movie star. Whatever the reason, Charles stepped it up after a few days and takes Wanda down to the bunker, which doesn’t surprise Alex in the least. Apparently, Charles used himself and Hank as live targets during Alex’s training and he continues this trend with Wanda.

When they emerge for dinner, they both look none worse for wear, though Erik keeps a steady eye on Charles just in case the guy’s brain explodes or his bones turn to jelly or whatever ungodly body horror that could occur.

The next morning Charles doesn’t show up at breakfast or any of his morning classes. Peter cruises the house until he finds Charles hiding in his bathroom.

“Holy shit!” Peter shouts, jerking back and hitting his arm against the doorframe.

Charles’ scalp gleams in the glare of the vanity lights. He’s bald as a plucked chicken and just as pissed off.

“Peter!” He whips his head around. “Can’t a bloke have a little privacy in his own _bathroom_! For God’s _sake_!”

“What the hell happened?”

 Peter rubs a hand over the man’s scalp. It feels smooth as a cue ball – no stubble whatsoever, like someone lasered off all the hair.

“It was an accident,” Charles explains, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You know, my hairline has been receding a bit and I thought – Well your sister, she tried to  -- I wasn’t supposed to _lose_ all my hair!”

The professor sounds dangerously close to tears, and Peter can feel his panic building. Even as a sort of maybe mature adult, he doesn’t deal well with crying, especially from other grown-ups.

“Maybe I should get Erik –“

“No! Don’t you dare! He cannot see me like this!”

“Uh . .. you do know you share the same bedroom, right? I mean, eventually, he’s got to . . .”

“I’ll sleep somewhere else.” Charles brings his hand up as if to run it through his hair before stopping and dropping down at his side. He takes in a shaky breath. “I’ve already told Erik I’m sick, and we’ll wait for it to grow back.”

“Charles, that’s literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say. Erik loves you. He’s not gonna care if you have hair or not.”

Judging by how unnaturally smooth Charles’ head is, Peter suspects that the hair is never going to grow back. But he doesn’t voice this concern.

“But – my _hair._ ” Charles’s voice cracks and Peter places an awkward arm around the man’s shoulder.

“Look on the bright side,” he says, “you look _even fucking younger_ than usual bald. You keep this up and people are going to suspect your secondary mutation is immortality.”

The corners of Charles’ mouth lift up the tiniest bit. Peter counts that as a victory.

And that’s when the bathroom door opens and Erik steps through.

“Charles, I set some soup on your nightst –“ He stops cold at the sight of Charles’ gleaming head.

Charles does some weird, jerky thing with his hand where he tries to unconsciously cover up his head but realizes at the last second how stupid and impossible that is. He drops his hand with a heavy sigh.

“You tried to get Wanda to fix your hairline, didn’t you?” says Erik, a smirk tugging on his mouth. He leans against the door frame.

“It’s _not_ funny, Erik,” Charles spits back, acid in his tone. “I don’t --  I don’t think it’s going to grow back.”

There goes his eyes, wide and watery and fluttering like a sad princess. Erik crumbles like a house of cards in the rain. He strides over to Charles, bends down, and kisses the life out of him.

“Oh. Wow. Okay.” Peter hastily throws his gaze at a nail in the wall beside him while his dads make out beside him.  When they don’t stop after a while, Peter clears his throat. “You know I’m still here, right?”

They finally break for air and Erik rests his head against Charles. “You’ve never looked more beautiful,” he whispers.

Charles gives Erik watery smile, and Peter throws up in his mouth a little.

“That’s my cue to leave,” he says before turning on his heel and walking out.

Those two don’t come down until almost dinner and Peter warns Raven away from the upstairs before she traumatizes herself for life.

 

By the time Wanda sees the damage she’s accidentally wrought, Charles has made his relative peace with his new shorn-lamb look. He pulls bald off with surprising dignity, and it lends an air of credibility that his fluffy hair couldn’t give him.

Wanda makes no peace about it. She leaves the room in tears, unmoved by everyone’s attempts to reassure her. Erik stops Peter when he tries to go after her.

“Let her parse out her feelings on her own. You can’t do all her thinking for her.”

He allows himself Erik to tug him back to the breakfast table.

Wanda skips classes that day and Charles says nothing. Peter spends his free period tracking her down in the library a few hours later, lunch in hand on a plate. She is lounging by the window, a book of poetry in hand.

“You missed lunch,” Peter says, setting the plate down on a nearby desk.

Wanda shrugs. No tears shine on her face, her face pale instead of blotchy.

“Well, it’s here if you want it.”

Nothing. Wanda ignores him in favor of her book, even though she isn’t turning any pages. The silence is so goddamn awkward, and Peter does _not_ like feeling as if he’s been dismissed.

“Look, what happened with Charles, it’s not your fault.”

Wanda turns a page. “Yes it is,” she says, matter of fact. “It’s my power. I did it. Ergo, my fault.”

“It’s not like you hurt him. Everything turned out fine.”

“He hates it. He’s devastated. Everything is not fine.”

Her tone and her words do not match up. He can’t tell if she’s actually upset or not. There is a deadness, a hollow acceptance in her voice that scares him infinitely more than hysteria and tears.

“Wanda . . .are you okay?” He has no idea what else to say, even though it’s a stupid question.

His sister sighs, sounding more world weary than a twelve-year-old ought to.

“I used to dream about having power like yours. To be one of you and go to this school. And now I got it and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Her words, and the dead tone she paints them in, pierce him like a volley of arrows.  He blinks tears from his stinging eyes.

“How can you say that?” he says, voice barely a whisper.

“Don’t you dare, Peter.” A hint of anger sparks in her, the first sign of life he’s seen so far. “You get to run really fast. You get to pull pranks and travel and save people. It’s great for _you_. I ruin everything I touch! I’m uncontrollable. Untrainable.  I’m a gun that’s broken and you never know when it’ll go off and what it will destroy. It sucks, Peter. It sucks in a way that you will never be able to understand. So don’t bother.”

She returns to her book, a very clear sign of dismissal that fills Peter with equal parts fury and despair.

He turns on his heel and leaves, not knowing what else to do.

 

They avoid each other for a while. Wanda loses interest in training, trying only halfheartedly, and then not trying at all. To Peter’s surprise, Charles seems upset about this.

“We went through something similar with Scott,” Charles says as he and Peter play a round of chess that evening while Erik and Wanda meditate. “He had difficulty accepting the destructive nature of his power.”

“Well what fixed it?”

“He still struggles, at times.”

“Great,” says Peter, sighing as Charles captures his queen. “Wanda’s gonna hate herself forever.”

Charles graces him with a soft smile. It’s still so weird to see him without his ridiculously boyish head of hair. “Don’t give up hope, Peter. Acceptance doesn’t happen overnight. Wanda just needs to see her powers doing something helpful rather than harmful.”

“That’s never going to happen if she stops trying.”

“She’s twelve years old. Have patience, friend.”

Peter tries. He keeps his distance from her, giving her space to think without his interference. A couple of days later he spies Wanda standing in front of the lightning struck tree, running her fingers over its blackened trunk. The leaves have started to turn brown and fall off at the top. He resists the temptation to go out there and talk to her, but someone else does not.

Scott approaches her, slowly enough to give her time to walk away. But she doesn’t. And to Peter’s shock, he watches Scott stand an easy distance from her and study the tree with his arms crossed, like it’s one of those algebra problems he hates.

He turns and says something to her, gesturing at the tree and oh God Peter wants to eavesdrop so goddamn bad, but Charles is in the kitchen helping prepare dinner and he sends a weak wave of Don’t-You-Dare to Peter’s head.

Any minute now an argument is gonna erupt and a branch will probably fall right on top of Scott’s head and kill him, and then Wanda will probably jump off the roof.

Instead she and Scott talk for several minutes, until Charles rings out the mental call for dinner. Wanda jumps, still not used to the intrusion even after a month. Scott hesitates a moment before putting his hand on her shoulder and says something that makes Wanda smile ever so slightly.

Peter has to pick his jaw up off the floor.

 

Later that evening, Wanda makes her peace with him. He and Erik are chilling in the library (and its thanks to him and Wanda that Peter even sets foot in the fucking place now) when she  approaches the couch hesitantly, a slim book clutched in both hands.

“Read to me?” she asks.

He has heard and seen this exact pose and that exact phrase more times than he could count, though back then she used to hold Little Golden Books instead of what looks like the volume of poetry Charles foisted on her during Literature class. They stare at each other a moment, an unspoken exchange of apology and forgiveness.

“Sure, Squirt.” He pats the space beside him and she climbs up on the couch. “You sure you want to read this flowery bullshit?”

“Yes,” says Wanda, flashing him a glare. “And it’s not flowery – bullshit.”

She says that last word in a hushed whisper, eyes darting over to Erik sorting through paper work across the room. Peter has to suppress a laugh. Mom is right; he is a horrible influence.

“Alright, alright. Don’t get your panties in a twist. Do you want me to start from the beginning or just flip open to a random page?”

“Any page is fine,” yawns Wanda. She curls up next to him, fluffy head resting on his chest.

So Peter flips to the middle of the book because why the hell not and starts reading. The poems are okay, they’re just words that gloss over in Peter’s mind as he reads them, their individual meaning clear to him but together creating empty syllables.

After a few pages, the peanut gallery decides to speak up.

“You’re a horrible reader,” says Erik. His eyes don’t leave the table but Peter flips him off anyway.

“Fuck off, Dad. I know what all these words mean.”

“Just because you have a college degree doesn’t mean you can mouth off to your father,” Erik warns, without any heat.

“Try and stop me, old timer.”

It’s a slight variation of an exchange they’ve repeated a lot in the last five years. The buttons on Peter’s worn jean jacket vibrate warningly before settling back down. Wanda watches them with wary eyes – she didn’t handle conflict very well, especially when Peter and Mom used to fight constantly – but then relaxed when she saw Erik’s shark smile.

“You have no emotion in your voice. It’s like listening to a robot.”

Peter huffs. “I can do emotion.”

He reads the next poem as over dramatically as possible until Wanda smacks him with a pillow and Erik is snickering.

“Be serious,” Wanda tells him. “For once.”

“You do know who you’re talking to, right?” retorts Peter, but he flips a page to a new poem, scans it for a moment, and then clears his throat. He can be serious and deep. You don’t have to like poetry to be a deep person.

“You do not have to be good,” Peter reads. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

He stops because holy fuck that’s the sort of line that takes your breath away. Something in the air shifts, the attention on him sharpens. Peter licks his lips and continues, intrigued..

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

“Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

“Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

Peter finishes on a whisper, mostly for dramatic effect, but also because it feels right. It’s a poem that deserves gravitas. He looks up to catch Erik staring a hole though him.

“Let me see that,” says Wanda. She grabs the book from Peter’s hand before he can answer and scrutinizes the page. Then she closes the book and gives him a swift kiss on the cheek. “Thank you for reading. Good night.” She waves to Erik. “Good night, Mr. Lehnsherr.”

And then she pads out of the library, book hugged close to her chest like it was made of gold.

 

Wanda keeps staring at the tree. Every now and then over the course of the next couple of days he finds running her fingers over the bark as if she were soothing the flank of a wounded animal (it’s habit now to watch her to make sure nothing explodes or implodes or dies). She always gives it one last, long look before leaving, as if steeling herself for something that never happens.

Finally one evening about a week later, she closes her eyes and presses purple covered hands against the trunk. The whole tree glows for a split second before returning to its natural state. Both Peter and Wanda freeze, staring at it and waiting for something horrible. Peter stands on the balls of his feet, ready to whisk her out of there if another lightning strike hits.

Nothing.

The tree just sits there, as it always does, ugly as hell and split nearly in two.

Wanda tilts her head back, the way she does when she tries to hold back tears, before walking back to the house with a rather defeated slump in her shoulders.

 

For two days the tree does nothing.

On the third day Scott practically beats Wanda’s door down before breakfast (Peter can hear him all the way in the kitchen).

“Get out of bed and go look at your stupid tree,” he hollers.

Wanda emerges from the dorm hallway still in her bathrobe, bushy hair barely restrained in a messy braid, and follows Scott into the yard completely barefoot.

Peter tags along out of curiosity and kneejerk caution for Scott’s safety.

There are tiny sprouts growing out of the blackened branches.

“You see,” says Scott softly. “It doesn’t suck all the time.”

Wanda’s grin threatens to split her face in two.

“Just most of the time.”

“Shut up, Scott,” Wanda says fondly.

She lays her head on his shoulder for a moment, and Peter looks at the sky for the sun to implode or Mars to come crashing down out of orbit because her and Scott are having a _Friendship Moment_ and what the fuck?! If there was any proof at all that Wanda’s powers shifted probability, it would be the sight of her and Scott not trying to verbally rip each other’s throats out.

Wanda kisses the tip of her finger and gently presses it against one of the green buds. She glares at Scott and Peter, daring them to say anything.

They (wisely) do not.

 

Wanda makes it her mission to cure dying plants, starting with the few survivors of Charles’ poor hydrangeas. Some of them wither and die on the spot, but other perk back up to their former glory in only a couple of days. Peter takes her into town and searches for the most pathetic, droopy-looking, dried-out potted plants to take home and rescue. Scott and Jean often tag along with them, and sometimes Peter takes them out for doughnuts afterward.

The gardens out back flourish with a veritable jungle of flowers and ferns and shit. Wanda could damn near open her own nursery at this point. In fact, Peter starts spending gym time with all students digging new flower beds to accommodate all the fucking flowers she adopts. The ones that develop under her care grow at least twice as big as they’re supposed to.  Charles starts taking his morning coffee on the terrace so he could better admire the gardens.

Peter thinks, on one particularly cool morning, about maybe giving Wanda some pumpkin seeds and seeing how big they would grow and if Charles would consider it cheating if Wanda won Biggest Goddamn Pumpkin at a country fair. Maybe they could even break a world record. . . .

 _Peter_.

Charles’ voice sounds in his mind, tense and urgent.

Busted. Why the fuck does Charles have to ruin everything fun?

_Peter you need to take Wanda and leave. Immediately._

Wait . . _what?_

The man’s fear and stress echo and mingle with Peter’s sudden unease. What happened? What could have caused this?

_Carl is here._

Shit fucking shit.

Peter’s eyes slide over to his sister, who pats in a fat fern beside a gangly rose bush, in ignorant bliss that will shatter any second now.

He finds himself getting furious.  After all the tears and destruction and fights they’ve finally _finally_ found a measure of peace that, quite frankly, Peter worked his goddamn ass for. That _Wanda_ worked her goddamn ass for, and this bastard is just going to show up and ruin it the second everything calms down.

What right does that bastard have to come here after everything he put Wanda through?

Wanda gives him a searching look.

“Something’s wrong. What is it?”

“Nothing.” Peter forces a smile. “Hey, who’s up for ice cream?”

Wanda points her spade at him. “Stop lying to me, Peter. What’s going on?”

He doesn’t know her perception is a side effect of her powers, with her ability to always be right when she guesses, or if she just inherited Mom’s I-Always-Know-When-You’re-Fucking-Up sense early. But before Peter can answer her, a voice shatters everything.

“Where is she?”

Wanda’s head snaps up at the unmistakable sound of her father’s voice.

“Daddy?” She whispers. Her face has gone white.

Before Peter can react she’s dropped the spade and dashes off to the back door.

“Wanda!”

He runs after her, but doesn’t try to stop her. She deserves to face whatever she thinks she can handle. But he does snag her before she can walk in on the warzone that currently occupies the foyer. He tucks them both away near the stairs, and they watch in silence.

Carl and Charles face off in the foyer. Charles has parked his chair directly in the man’s way to keep Carl from setting foot further in.

“I’m sorry, but I cannot permit you to see her,” Charles was saying, holding his hands up in a placating gesture that Peter knows will only piss off Carl more.

“You can’t tell me that!” Carl jabs his finger at Charles. “She’s my daughter. I’m her _father._ I have every right to see her! And no crippled freak in a wheelchair is going to stop me.”

Crippled. Freak.

Peter’s entire body vibrates with the urge to drive his fist into that fucking bastard’s head.

_Peter. Don’t. Not in front of her._

But it’s not Peter Charles should worry about.

The wall sconces start shaking and twisting until they rip away from the wood, dragging electrical wires behind them. They flatten into a wide band that shoots out and clotheslines Carl in the fucking throat, shoving him back into the wall.

Erik stalks in front of the man, hand held out like some kind of Darth Vader Force Choke while Carl wiggles like a worm on a hook.

“Erik!” Charles barks, but Erik ignores him and Charles doesn’t try very hard to stop him.

“You don’t deserve the title of father,” Erik hisses, sounding positively _lethal._ “You stopped being her father when you rejected her gift and called her a _monster.”_

“She . . has . . .no  . . .other,” Carl rasps out.

“She has _me_. She has Charles. She has Peter and her mother. She doesn’t need you. And you will never bother her again.”

Erik clenches his fingers and the metal bites into Carl so tightly that blood beads along its edge and Peter realizes that Erik fully intends to decapitate Carl right here in the foyer. Wanda trembles in his arms like a leaf in a storm.

“ _Erik!”_ Charles yells. His fingers reach for his temple but Wanda’s scream startles everyone.

“Daddy!”

She tears out of his arms and races into the foyer, tackling into the back of Erik’s legs like an NFL linebacker. This doesn’t accomplish much because Wanda is shorter than five feet and can’t weight more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. But it knocks Erik’s concentration enough for the metal band to drop to the floor.

Carl sags to the carpet gasping for hair and wiping blood away from his neck. Peter dashes in, stopping in between Erik and Carl, not entirely sure what the fuck to do. On one hand, Carl is a piece of human garbage and Peter wants to hurl him from the roof. But on the other hand, he doesn’t _actually_ want Carl to die, and he sure as fuck doesn’t want Wanda seeing her father get his head popped off, no matter how horrible he is.

But Peter doesn’t need to do anything because Wanda crouches down next to Carl.

“Daddy?  Are you okay?”

“Don’t you see what they are?” Carl rasps. “They’re monsters, freaks, all of them. I don’t want you to stay long enough to become one.”

Wanda gives him a long, searching look and her heart breaks in her eyes at the conclusion she reaches.

“I’ve always been one of them,” she tells him with more gentleness than he deserves. “And we’re not monsters, even if we do terrible things sometimes.”

She stands and glares witheringly at Erik, who flinches as if Wanda had physically slapped him. Then she holds out her hand to Carl. He recoils away from her and stands shakily to his own feet.

“Daddy,” Wanda’s voice cracks a bit, and she takes a deep breath to carry on. “If you can’t accept all of me . . .then I can’t accept any of you. I want you to leave. And I – and I don’t want you to talk to me any more.”

Tears slip down her cheeks, but she refuses to acknowledge them. She turns to Erik.

“Don’t you touch him again or I will make you worse than bald,” she hisses and then with the dignity of a princess, sweeps out of the room.

Peter can only watch her leave in silent awe.

Carl walks out the front door without another word, and Erik stands resolutely in the doorway, like the Queens’ Guard, until Carl’s car disappears out the gates.

 

For an entire week, Peter, Erik, and Charles rank the top three on Wanda’s shit list. She doesn’t speak to any of them, not a single word. She’s positively furious at Erik for trying to kill Carl and equally pissed at Peter and Charles for not trying very hard to stop him. She’s so livid she would have skipped the classes they taught if summer vacation wasn’t in full swing already.

So instead she hangs out with Scott and then Jean on the weekends and watches T.V. with Raven and Hank and pointedly ignores everyone else.

As far as fights with Wanda goes, this is not Peter’s first rodeo. It sucks, and she’s more pissed at him than she has been her entire stay here, but experience gives him the patience to wait her out and the confidence that she doesn’t actually hate his guts. And Charles has dealt with a thousand moody teenage silent treatments, so he’s fine.

Erik, on the other hand, is devastated.

He drags Peter to the bookstore in town looking for apology presents, and he spends at least half an hour flipping through poetry books before settling on a volume of English Romantics.

They leave the books with a note in front of her bedroom door.

Two days later the books still sit there.

He doesn’t try to talk to Wanda, but his gaze tracks her every time they occupy the same room in hopes that today she might actually look at him.

“Dude, you gotta chill out,” Peter tells him one evening in Erik’s study. “You’re taking this way too hard.”

“She’s Magda’s child,” says Erik softly. “I know she’s not mine in any way, but sometimes . . . sometimes it feels like it. I can’t explain it.”

Man, if Wanda could hear this she would fucking pass out, pissed off or not. Peter grins and claps Erik on the shoulder.

“Well, she could use a good dad like you.”

“She’s not going to want one. Not from me.”

Peter rolls his eyes. It’s not that Erik isn’t in genuine pain, but Jesus he’s more fucking dramatic than an old Hollywood starlet. “She does this shit all the time to me. She always snaps out of it.”

“She cares for you,” says Erik. “I was a stranger to her, and now I’m a monster.” He grimaces and downs the finger of whiskey still in his glass. “I thought those instincts in me had died, but they were just waiting for the right moment.”

“Carl is a piece of shit. It doesn’t take a monster to want to put that fucker out of his misery, especially after he threatened Charles.” Peter clenches his fingers.  “Hell, if you weren’t going to I probably would have.”

Erik keeps his gaze on his empty glass, a thousand yard stare.

“If she hadn’t stopped me I would have killed him. Right in front of her.”

“No you wouldn’t have.” Peter tells him and thank God Erik isn’t a telepath because not even Peter can bring himself to completely swallow that statement.

“I guess we’ll never know.”

 

Four days later at dinner Wanda looks across the table and says, “Can you pass the broccoli, please, Mr. Lehnsherr?”

“Of course.” The coolness of his reply is ruined by how he nearly drops his fork in his haste to pass her the ceramic dish in question.

“Thank you. Peter, you have mashed potatoes on your nose.”

And just like that, they are released from the doghouse and everything is cool.

(Everything is not cool because Wanda calls Mom, and Erik and Peter decide to organize the attic since Charles won’t shut up about it needing to get done and it’s totally not a coincidence that it just happens to be when Mom pulls in the driveway.)

(It doesn’t work for very long and they both receive a vicious tongue lashing that can be summed up as Why The Fuck Can’t You Kick My Pre-Teen Child Out Of The Room _Before_ You Rough Up My Ex-Husband How Fucking Stupid and Insensitive Are You?)

 

A couple of weeks later, the divorce is well on its way to getting finalized, and Mom takes a weekend off to celebrate at the school. Charles broke out a bottle of wine after the kids were sent to bed and everyone stayed up until nearly three in the morning. (Okay so it was more like eight bottles of wine. And some beer. And a few shots of bourbon). If the school hadn’t been on summer break, Charles would have cancelled class the next day.

Both she and Erik are obnoxiously early morning people and too experienced with alcohol to have much of a hangover the next morning. Even through a blinding headache, Peter forces himself up at the ass crack of dawn so he can have coffee with her and Erik in the kitchen.

The world is quietly limitless in the sunrise. and Peter finds himself more at peace in these moments with his family—percolator gurgling in the background and soft, fragile sunlight spilling across the table by the window—than in five years of meditation. It’s the kind of moment you reach for when everything goes to shit, and it’s the kind of moment that braces you when you're on the brink of losing hope.

 

This morning Peter stumbles into the kitchen and finds his Mom already nursing a cup of coffee and peering out the window.

“How long has this been going on?” She asks.

He gazes over her shoulder at Erik and Wanda meditating under the Lightning Tree (as Wanda calls it).

“A few weeks,” he replies. “It’s supposed to help calm her emotional state or whatever so she doesn’t keep breaking things with her powers. Scott Summers can only take so many concussions.”

“Is it working?”

“Yeah. I think so. She really likes doing it, but I can’t tell if that’s because of the meditation or because of Dad.”

“. . . they spend a lot of time together?” Mom cracks an eyebrow.

“Are you kidding me? She’s got her head so far up his ass I’m surprised her voice doesn’t come out of his mouth when he speaks.” Peter studies her. “That doesn’t bother you, does it?”

“No. Just surprised. Maybe I shouldn’t be.” She takes a sip from her cup. “He loves you so much and she’s your sister, so . . .”

“She’s also _your_ daughter. He’s kind of unofficially adopted her.”

Mom smiles into her cup.

“So I have a surprise for you,” she says.

Peter instantly feels wary.

“Is this a ‘surprise! Here’s fifty bucks!’ kind of surprise or a ‘Surprise! Wanda blew up car and I’m getting a divorce!’ kind of surprise?”

“It’s more of a ‘Surprise, I’m going to stay here and be Charles’ live-in nurse’ kind of surprise.”

Peter nearly chokes on his coffee. “ _What?_ Seriously?”

“Yeah. That’s, like, not going to kill your buzz here is it?”

“No! It’s awesome! But . . . how does that even happen?”

Mom shrugs. “He’s always asking me medical advice about his condition, especially when it comes to travel. He’s still relearning everything, you know? Finally I asked him a few months ago why he just doesn’t break down and get his own live-in nurse to help not only with him but with kids at school. I’m not sure that Hank’s actually qualified, bless his blue little heart. And he asked why not me?”

Peter’s eyebrows raise. “That was several months ago?”

“Yeah. I turned him down. I wasn’t in any position to leave D.C. and live here. But then . . .”

“Wanda blew up the car,” Peter says.

“Wanda blew up the car.”

Peter worries at his lip, a habit he’s picked up from Wanda, as he mulls over a certain question. The Question, really. The one he’s always wanted to ask and never quite dared. But now he thinks it might be safe.

“Why . . .why did it take so long? Why did it even happen in the first place?” He keeps his voice neutral, schools away the petulant whine that threatens to come out.

Mom sighs in her coffee cup and doesn’t answer for a long moment.

“I needed him,” she says. “When I left your father I left with nothing. Or I thought I did.  I left Europe with the determination of becoming a new person and erasing everything that made me stand out, that reminded me of. . .” She swallows and takes a drink of her coffee.  “I changed my accent. I got a job. But then I found out that I was pregnant with you and I couldn’t . . . I knew I couldn’t do that alone. Even America doesn’t look too kindly at that sort of thing. I needed someone to help support me, as much as I hated that. I also needed someone to help me blend in. I found Carl.”

She smiles, softly. “To his credit, he didn’t care that I was already pregnant. He didn’t care about all the teasing his friends gave him, or the looks they gave me. I don’t know what happened to him, Peter, but he didn’t start off an asshole. Something has just made him bitter and twisted over time, and I could never find out why. I don’t even think he knows. But after Wanda, enough is enough. I don’t need him anymore, especially if he’s going to act like that. “

A deep sigh. “Maybe someday he will straighten himself out enough for Wanda. I still have hope for him.”

Peter knows there’s a lot more to this story than she is telling. He’s pieced it together based on things that Erik has said and stuff he’s learned in class. He knows the reason why he’s never had any extended family on either side, why Mom wears plain clothing and agrees with all their neighbors at cookouts and why sometimes the stories of her “past” never exactly match up. Why she’s so protective of Wanda. Why she distanced herself from Peter the moment he started acting out.

He doesn’t ask for confirmation. He knows Mom might not ever be okay enough to talk about it. She and Erik have more in common than he first thought. Perhaps that’s why they can’t stray from each other’s orbits.

It’s one thing to empathize.

It’s another thing to _know._

“Maybe he will,” says Peter.

Who is he to judge? It worked for Erik.

“Good morning, my dears.”

Charles wheels into the kitchen, his face still creased from sleep. If he still had hair, it would be sticking straight up at this point. Mom fixes him a cup of coffee and they descend into quiet discussion about what they don’t remember about last night. Peter smirk and sips his coffee, turning his gaze back out the window to the tree and its occupants.

He never imagined the possibility of having a family that wasn’t splintered into pieces. Honestly, he never imagined having his family period, even splintered. But the joy that comes from this new reality isn’t ecstatic, it doesn’t drive him to whoop and holler from the rooftops. It seeps into his bones like warm honey and makes him still.

It makes him wonderstruck, really. And when he thinks back into the last five years of his life, he wonders how the fuck it’s all possible. The odds that Charles would find him, the odds that the man he broke out of prison is his father, the odds of them coming together, healing.

The odds. The odds. The odds.

(How early can mutants manifest?)

  _Or,_ Charles whispers in his mind, _perhaps it's just Fate_.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this marks the end of the series chronologically. I have ideas for scenes and bits and pieces and I might put up a fic as a catch-all for that, but there are no sequels planned. BUT -- X-men Apocalypse might change all that. We'll see. Thanks to everyone who has stuck around so long! Your love is appreciated and it's what kept me going! <3
> 
> Edit: I forgot to credit the poem Wanda read! It's "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver. It was published in the mid eighties, but I went ahead and used it because it fits so well and it's not that big of a time difference from 1978. When I first read it, it blew me away, much like Wanda, haha.
> 
> If anyone wants to follow me on tumblr, they can find me at www.blarfkey.tumblr.com


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